jack barse

Network integration is extremely difficult, even when you’ve got similar infrastructure. (Are you listening, Nextel and Sprint?) I’m sure that Bill Hogg has his hands full trying to build a single decent network out of Cingular’s and AT&T’s old systems. I apparently was caught up in some sort of migration issue yesterday and Thursday.

The first symptom was that I was getting voice mail notifications without my phone ringing. That happened a couple of times on Thursday, but I wrote it off to sunspots . Then yesterday I got nothing but network busies when I tried to make a call. It didn’t matter where I was: inside, outside, here at the house, in Laurel, Bethesda or Chevy Chase. No way was I going to get a channel, and people couldn’t reach me.

After lunch I called Cingular’s customer service. The Level 1 tech said that since I was getting a lot of network busies then obviously the network must be very busy. “You know, there’s a lot going on with our merger with SunCom,” she said. I didn’t even bother arguing with that absurb statement; clearly that young lady needs a bit more training. I immediately asked to speak to a Level 2 tech.

Linda came on the line a couple of minutes later, and tried a bunch of things, none of which worked. She put me on hold, then returned saying that she had just spoken with the network operations folks and they reported no trouble whatsoever in Washington. Her conclusion: it must be a hardware problem. On my end, of course. I said I’d charge up an old phone and try that one, and she helpfully said to call back if that didn’t fix it. I charged up a S-E T68i that I bought from AT&T a couple of years ago, then pulled the SIM card out of my V620 and put it into the T68. You can guess the rest: same trouble. So much for the rotten handset theory, Linda. I gave up for a couple of hours and took care of some other things.

I kept turning the phone off and on (’power cycling’ in geek speak), and removing and replacing the SIM card (’rebooting’) as I drove around, hoping that my problems really were a bad cell. But that would have been a) too simple and b) beyond the realm of possibilities. Remember, Linda told me that there were no network problems.

I finally got fed up and called Cingular again. Frank came on the line, and I said, “Frank, you’re the third person I’ve spoken to today about this, and I’d like to get it fixed.” We went through just about everything, and he finally had me manually select the network instead of letting the phone select it. Bingo! I switched back to automatic mode, and the problem returned. Back to manual and all’s well. While he was at it he straightened out the billing mess created by the retail clerk, and warned me that I was going to have to call them again because I was going to get a second bill, thanks to Mr. Retail Genius. All in all we were on the phone for 50 minutes, and I thanked him by saying that I hoped that this call was ‘being recorded for training purposes.’ I’m sure they’re not paying him enough money.

PS: Alex was having the same trouble with her LG phone. I set hers to manual today, too, and that seemed to take care of it.

PPS: So Bill, whatever migration troubles you’re having, can you get your guys to be a little more careful with the settings?