Severe Cingular Outages

You know what, if Cingular is messing up in your area its time to switch to Verizon.
49.99 gets you 500 anytime, unlimited nights and weekends, and 1000 M2M. I am asuming from your zip code that you are somewere in upstate NY? I am an RPI grad and i can tell you, in upstate NY, Verizon is king for coverage.

 

could it be possible that they converted the tower to gsm ?

 

Is this TDMA or GSM?

 

the first poster has TDMA. notice his phone is a C331t the "t" is for tdma

 

Considering all of the problems you have been having, seems like you could get out of your contract if you threw a big enough fit

I would change my Cing. Voicemail message to direct your clients that you have a new phone number....after a month, turn off the Cing. service.

 

I agree. Thats what i did for 2 months and i didn't have any problems. My friend is doing this now for 3 months till the end of her contract.

 

Comfr3ak,

I am a die hard Cingular wireless subscriber, in the Buffalo area. I personally have not had any issues with the service from Cingular, however like I said I am in a different area than you.

My personal opinion is you need to contact someone that will help you. Call the tech support line, or go down to the store and demand to talk to a supervisor. Ask what the specific problem is and what the ETA is on a solution. Tell them your issue and how long you have had the problem. Also throw around the fact that your friend (make one up if you have to) has never had this issue with his/her Verizon phone.

If you don't get satisfactory results I would then do what the others suggested and try Verizon, or another network in your area that works better. I would ask others in your area what network they are on. You can ask people here what the best network is, and they will all tell you the network they use. You need to know what works best in YOUR area, not half way across the country. Just as an example, You live near Rochester, and your Cingular service is bad. I live near Buffalo and my Cingular service is great.

Hope that helps a little.

 

My phone does not buzz, and neither does my wife's phone. The signal strength in my area has been much better with the 6340 and many people tell me I sound so much better on it. My mother who is very sensitive says I sound just like I am talking on a regular land line phone.

I have not been able to use it to it's fullest yet as we don't have GSM in our area. We only have TDMA.

Personally I love my phone and the Cingular service. So much so I even cheer on Robby Gordon each Sunday of the Nascar season.

I would ask a rep if they have a loaner phone you could try for a weekend to see if you like it. I work for a big company and we have a Cingular rep that comes in to the office. She gave me a loaner phone before I got mine to see if I wanted to switch. Before I had an Ericsson T60, and was thinking about getting the Ericsson T62U. One weekend with my 6340i, and I was hooked. I made her come back and give me one of my own.

Hope this helps you a little more. If you want, feel free to e-mail me directly and we can talk about Cingular and my experience with them.

 

WARNING: If you don't want to become a Cingular hater DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT get a 6340i....That is the worse phone in history. Those of you who do not get the buzz is because the signal is strong whenever you use the phone and also you are using TDMA. If you use the phone in GSM mode and in a weak area, your callers may hear a loud buzz instead of your voice. Useless phone IMO for those who need something reliable, especially people like you who rely on your cell for business. Among its plethora of problems, the 6340i has the bad habit of shutting itself off inexplicably, draining the battery with useless network searches and sometimes it refuses to dial by giving you error messages. And let's not forget the problems with the voice commands and how it can magically make your voice memos dissapear. All these problems have been reported by many, many users including myself. If some of you have not experienced any of these problems, you probably don't use it enough to notice the problems, or maybe you got one of the very few good models so consider yourself lucky. Remember back a few months ago when Cingular kept pulling out the 6340 and replacing it? Well, they were not exactly playing hide and seek with the 6340i, they were removing it because they were having so many problems with it. Call any Customer Service rep and I am sure they will admit all the horror stories about this phone. Or better yet, ask any Cingular store employee how many 6340i's they have had returned. You'll be surprised! If you don't believe me, ask AT&T why they won't be carrying the 6340i after they gave it so much consideration.

Peace...

 

First off to the original poster:

I know it's a cute little phone and all, and that you are having service outages, but for good heavens please use a better phone than the C331 series!

I usually am in total agreement with you bobolito, and you might have had a few problems that turned you off that phone. But I must say in my area (Philadelphia) region, I have NEVER SEEN a better phone in terms of reception than the 6340i. Everyone in the Philadelphia region that I work with knows that when a customer is in need of a reliable reception the hands down best phone to pick is a 6340i. I have over 400 6340i's sold out of my location since their inception, and we have only had to send ONE back for warranty work. In addition, I have had less than 10 people complain about reception, and the solution was for them to turn their phone off and on... and 5 or 6 of them have since told me it's the greatest phone ever. The other few, had issues resolved and are happy. In my 4 years in the wireless industry I have never used a phone that has given me such great reception, and such ease of "problem fixing."

When your 6340 acts up, all you need to do is turn it off and back on, and it will select a better tower. In my market it is accessing T-mobiles GSM reception, Cingular's TDMA reception, Cingular's GSM reception, AT&T's TDMA reception, and AT&T's GSM reception, and some TDMA towers built in the past by a few no name companies. There has never been a phone that go so much reception from Cingular before.

I've only had one out of about 400 have that problem.

I've never heard that rumor.

Yes, that will happen anytime you're phone has selected a tower that is reached it's user capacity. Some phones will jump to a new tower iunstantly, but the 6340 will often need a jumpstart by turning it off and on. Has anybody EVER told you the "off and on" trick?

I've never once heard of the problem, experienced the problem, or had CS reps tell me the problem when we were discussing the phone. I talk to at least 10-15 CS reps per day.

That simply NEVER happened. My entire market has been able to get as many 6340's as we need, and we've never sent a batch back from off of our shelves.

It simply never happened Bob. I do happen to know that a few CS reps were very inexperienced on the 6340, often times people call CS, then CS can't fix the problem, then the CS rep and the customer feel like it's a faulty product. As much as I like Cingular, I'd have to say it was a faulty CS rep! It seemed to me when I called CS about it, I had to educate rep after rep as to how to resolve common issues quickly, and since it seemed many didn't know how to do it, many customers were let down.

This isn't an issue of having a crappy phone, it's an issue of nobody being there to tell you how to resolve your problems. They might have appeared like they knew what they were doing, but I'd bet $50 they didn't.

The horror stories seem to come from reps who had no clue how to fix the issues. I recognized the pattern after enough phone calls to CS, while picking their brain about phones.

I'm a Cingular Employee, and I've never had one returned all together. I've only had to send ONE back for warranty. And in my pod of stores we have sold over 2,500 6340's with less than 5 that had to go back. Those phones were the phones that powered off and on, and they were replaced instantly by Nokia. In fact, in my store everytime we sell somebody a phone that gets a bad reception in their area, for example the Motorola 720T was returned past the return period for poor reception, we put the customer in the 6340. I've done this for at least 5 customers who bought a TDMA only or a GSM only phone and came back wanting better reception. I heard from one girl the other day who I did this for, and she says it's the greatest phone she's ever owned.

What is your source for all the afforementioned information?

Would I be correct in thinking most of the info came from Cingular CS?

 

Cingular Rep -

Today I returned my 6340i. It was near the end of the return period and I was, to be quite honest, afraid to keep the phone. I made many calls to Cingular regarding low signal strength and dropped calls near where I live here in the Kansas City area. Apparently there was nothing that they could do other than assure me that their system was working properly. They were not able to offer any assurances that their GSM system, when placed in service, would improve my signal quality. When on Cingular Extended, my T-Mobile reception was great.

I REALLY like the phone. I may try it again after the GSM laumch scheduled for August. Please feel free to tell me if the on/off thing was the solution.

 

CingularRep....I agree that the 6340i does a great job with reception. If you read my message carefully, I never said the phone was a poor receiver. I was not turned off by my experience with it. My experience with the 6340i simply confirmed all the problems I was told about it and that includes warnings from Cingular technicians themselves.

That is exactly my point, a cell phone should not act up period. A phone that I have to turn off and back on to get it to work only qualifies as problematic and unreliable IMO.

I am surprised how little you understand about wireless technology. This has nothing to do with tower capacity. It is simply that the phone is buggy and I needed to shut it off. This has nothing to do with selecting towers. A reliable phone should not have to be powered cycled to get it to work again, period!

Draining the battery with useless network searches is not a rumor. It is a fact. A well designed piece of hardware will only execute extensive functions only when necessary, not every two minutes.

If you never heard about the problem with the voice recorder that's not an excuse for an existing problem. You simply just learned something new and need to investigate about it.

How can you state Cingular never pulled the 6340? Everyone here knows it.

The horror stories come from regular customers that simply got fed up with the phone buzzing and powering off by itself and there are MANY out there. Tell me, if you think most CS are uneducated about the issues with the 6340i, how do I fix the buzzing problem? How do I stop it from powering off by itself? I suppose powering off/on will solve it, right? My point is, a reliable phone should not have to be powered off and on just to get it to work.

I know that AT&T was supposed to carry the 6340i since last year. I have documents from AT&T announcements showing their plans for 2002 and 2003. They have delayed the launch of the 6340i several times already due to problems. Cingular just went ahead and released it with all the problems. Maybe when the issues are resolved they will launch it because things can always change. However, for now, they don't have plans for it.

I said it before and I will say it again. If you get a good working 6340i consider yourself lucky. Maybe in your market they shipped the latest batch of 6340i that had little to no problems, but I need to remind you that there is a world outside your Philadelphia market where many defective 6340i reached the streets. Also, double check your statements. In my experience, no complains from customers doesn't always mean everything is alright.

 

my head hurts......EVERYONE here knows who i worked for. Im telling you from a corporate point of view, directly from the inside. (techs, managers, area managers, corp techs, inside employees, ect.... the phone is NO GOOD.....

 

Ok Bobolito, I figured maybe there was a possibility I didn't have information outside of my market pertaining to the 6340 being pulled from the shelves, so I called my Cingular Territorial Manager today and asked him for the heads up. I trust him as he happens to live around the corner from me and comes in often to shoot the breeze. He covers Pennsylvania, Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. I asked him if any market had to pull 6340's off the shelves, and he said no. He said the only time they got removed from the shelves was when we got 6340i's in instead of 6340's and sent the regular 6340's back so that we could just jump right into the "i" model. This was about 6 or 7 months ago.

He did however say that he's heard a bunch of complaints with powering on and off, and he's seen quick warranty turnaround time for each situation. And, I'll agree with you on one thing, users shouldn't have to turn their phones on and off for a better reception. I am a believer that the reason why the problem occurs is because the phone can access such a large amount of towers that sometimes when it finds a trouyble tower it doesn't totally recognize the issue. I look at this as a positive rather than a negative. If I have to turn my phone off and on every once in a while, and the benefit is that I access 3 or 4 times as many towers as any other phone on the American market, I can live with that.

PS. He laughed when I said that the people on this message board think AT&T isn't stocking the 6340 due to it's problems. He also added, "The verizon guys are against it, because they aren't selling it."

just my $.02

 

Huh? What does the 6340 have to do with Verizon? Tell your TM to get a better sense of humor. Cingular must be against the VX4400, after all, they don't sell it.

 

Well I told him how a Verizon guy on the board kept insisting how bad the 6340 sucked, and his reply was, "he's against it, because he isn't selling it."

If I said the VX4400 sucked, and I had no real knowledge of the phone then you could say "Brian, you're against that phone only because you aren't selling it."

 

Which Verizon guy are you referring to? nj? You know he worked for Cingular right?

 

Yes

I find it odd, that people who USED to work for a company feel they know the company better than people who CURRENTLY work for the company. How long ago did his employment with them cease?

 

Let me suggest something. GIVE IT A REST!!! This posting started out as a simple question and a couple good answers. Then it turned into a sparing match between to people. One hard headed Cingular rep (I love Cingular) and one hard headed wireless advisor. GIVE IT A REST!!! Your bickering like an old married couple and it is doing nothing to answer the question at hand.

It is clear that you both have opposing views and nothing you say can change the other. So STOP TRYING!!

NEXT QUESTION!!

 

Sorry it seems to be a sparring match. I however will work to correct misleading or incorrect facts as I can, and as I see them. Is it possible that I'm wrong? Well anything's possible, I don't claim superior intellect, I have been wrong once before.



PS. I would love to hear this question answered before we veer away from the topic: "How long ago did his employment with them cease?"

 

Bickering like an old married couple?? Hardly. You are correct, the direction this thread has gone does nothing to answer the question at hand, but if every thread was not allowed to deviate at all from the original topic, probably 80% of the threads on this board would be locked.

If you are referring to me as one of the "persons with opposing views," you are mistaken. I have never used the 6340 and have never used Cingular. I never stated the 6340 was a bad phone either. I just didn't understand the original Verizon comment that the CingularRep referred to, as of course Verizon doesn't sell the 6340 since it would not work on Verizon's network. I, for one, am not trying to change anyone's mind.


As to CingularRep's question, I think nj was working with Cingular until one or two months ago when he quit. He can answer that question better than I can though!

 

Exactly, which is why I don't think this thread is a "sparring match." Info was posted which you did not agree with. Whether you are right or wrong doesn't really matter in this case...if the phone was so bad, it would be permanently recalled (I hope!). You and others have good experiences with the phone, so you see fit to defend it. Given what I have read in the Nokia forum, I would place the 6340 on the same level as Verizon's T720...very problematic, but still liked by many. Probably why the Motorola forum has a bunch of T720 haters and proponents that always have very different opinions as to the quality and function of the phone.

 

This debate is enough to frighten anyone into backing away from this phone. Who can sort out who is right and who is wrong here? It is safer to let Cingular keep the phone rather than take the chance that some significant problem may evidence itself later and prove the doubters to be right.

 

You have one listed in your profile, what do you think? Have you experienced the problem?

Ironically, I just received a call from someone whose 6340 powers off out of nowhere. I wonder if the folks on this board jinxed my customers.