AT&T/Cingular Capacity Problems?

I am in the Inland Empire, and YES, there are problems with the "New" Cingular. I recently got rid of them for this very reason. I also have T-Mobile and have NOT experienced any issues. I have experienced issues with Cingular all over the IE. If it wasn't spotty service, then it was customer service that drove the final nail in the coffin for me. I had the 64K SIM in my V551. It is supposed to find the "strongest" blue/orange network for a given area. For me, it seemed to find the weakest. Now we are beginning to see merger-related problems that may only get worse. Thankfully I'm rid of Cingular. Now I use my Verizon and T-Mobile service that actually work.

 

I live in Northern Colorado and my dad is currently on an old ATT TDMA plan and he has had issues similar to those you are describing mescpa. There have been many times that I have attempted to call his cell and I get drooped directly to voicemail or I will be talking with him and during the call his voice will just break up and I am unable to make out what he is saying. I live in Northern Colorado. My dad is going to switch over to VZW when his current contract is up next month Becuse he is tired of dealing with these issues in addition to customer service.

 

welcome to the New Cingular they're one of our clients and they are deploying like crazy. They are being very hard on us consultants to get their networks built. Our sites are 06 and 07 "seed" sites but if you can bring them in for 05 they want it in a bad way.

They plan is they want to roll ALL current CW customers off the T-Mobile network by 06. So all the customers that were ATT that enjoyed overnight coverage without roaming etc will be in for a rude awakening if they do not have their network up to snuff for this migration. Expect to see more capacity and coverage problems in 06. Reason for this, they dont want to pay T-Mobile anymore money to have their customers on that network.

Currently the expected build plan for CW for 05 is close to 500...figure in 20% attrition for these sites to fall out and that's what you get.

 

This would explain why I noticed a marked difference in signal level on my old Cingular phone VS my T-Mobile phone. I know that Cingular is still using their "old" network (Now T-Mo's) here in SoCal. They must be making the new 64K SIMs favor the Blue network here. The T-Mobile/Ex-Cingular network is quite strong where I live, and the Blue network is spotty.

 

ding ding ding...they're concentration a lot right now on network expansion so hopefully your capacity problems will go away towards the latter part of the year.

 

Thanks for the great info foofighter

 

Whatever Cingular does with their capacity issues in SoCal are irrelevant to me now. I dumped them a over a month ago.

BTW, for the first few months I had the T-Mobile & Cingular service concurrently, the signal levels were identical. The Cingular phone favored Orange over Blue and T-Mo was also on Orange until they officially took over network in January.

It was in February when I started to notice signal issues with the CW phone that were not happening on my T-Mo phone. I thought CW and T-Mo would be sharing the network for the next year or so. I guess, as you stated in a different post, CW wants to transition off of the T-Mo/old Orange net to the Blue. I didn't think the effects would be as considerable as they were. After just 5 months of Cingular (lack of) service, I got rid of them.

 

Thank you foofighter for the info. The samethings have been happening in my area too, since the first of the year. It dosn't help that AT&T never building out in Bullhead (AZ), but doing so on my side of the river. Also this area is booming so all the new people are using the T-Mo/Cingular Orange network.

 

their build plan is 500 sites this year...and a majority of these sites are going to be capacity sites specifically FOR the migration of the CW customers over from the orange network. It's mind boggling...i dont think they'll do it...you always figure in at least 20% attrition rate. 06 is even nuttier...they want 700 sites for 06!!! How's that for aggressive?

I know that we'll have jobs for a good time frame as this building just never seems to stop, as consumers such as our selves buy more and more feature rich phones that require more and more bandwidth, it'll just require more and more sites to be built (job security for me)

 

700 sites for 2006?!? I hope the cities don't start cracking down on towers because of that. I remember when Pac Bell was getting agressive (circa 1996-97) all of these moratoriums on cell sites start happening. That's part of why it took Sprint longer than expected to build their network around the same time.

 

larry i really feel it's a pie in the sky pipe dream 700 is an immense undertaking but wishful thinking

 

1200 sites in the next two years. I wish them luck, but I would agree with you on it being a pipe dream.

 

You've got to understand the SBC corp mentality of upper mgmt. Their policy is: "Over inflate the numbers so the prospects look good to investors and industry."

When DSL was starting out, the target was 1 milllion lines in the first year. It was a banner that was SMS pushed to every PC (at least in CA). The target was woefully short. Then it was discovered that all "the leadership" did, was take the true original estimate from those that know and added an extra zero at the end.

Look good on paper. We'll deal with the fall out later.

 

I was wondering when people's Cingular phones would be favoring the blue over the orange networks. It will be interesting to see how their churn rate stays.

 

NO DOUBT...their having a good ol time right now. CW customers have been spoiled while old ATT customers know what it's like to have no service. It will definitely be interesting to see how CW customers like being on the Blue network.