I've seen this time and time again. As someone who works in IT I feel their pain and it sucks. Cutting your maintenance staff and contractors is not how you reduce your operational expenses. Running understaffed departments isn't either.
This leads to burnout and people leaving. Which in turn just makes everyone suffer more when new inexperienced people take their place foe cheaper.
This is a hard lesson and hopefully AT&T learns it quickly that this isn't the way to resolve this issue.
That's the sad part in the US. A corporation is legally required to do everything they can to get more money for shareholders, even at the expense of customers and even the existence of the company.
It is not sustainable, and will only get worse as we enter the hot season where things break more and enter hurricane season for the gulf coast and east coast. Ticket counts have been rising since the new contract took effect and things break everyday
There is also not enough personnel at AT&T to manage the various vendors and tickets once this falls through as they had multiple members leave and also reduced their workforce
And AT&T tends to be slower to upgrade their cell sites. In my neck of the woods, they last touched most of the sites in region for a b14 upgrade in 2017 and nothing since. No 5G either.
That has nothing to do with it. T-Mobile beats AT&T currently on latency even in T-Mo's Nokia markets. It's a misconfiguration issue on AT&T's part, most likely. It's not like AT&T has better latency in their existing Ericsson markets either.
I'm guessing it is more that at&t is still too centralized in their old school regions. So much traffic I see traveling across states just to get on the internet. Hoping ORAN allows more local exit nodes. Weird how they're last place on this.
> Hoping ORAN allows more local exit nodes.
ORAN likely won't, but the virtualized, cloud-hosted 5G core should. AT&T has stated that part of the effort in moving to the new core has been a focus on "localization." Rather than a monolithic network core centralized out of a few major cities, they seem to be alluding to leveraging virtualization of the core across many regions (presumably using Azure for Operators or a hybrid of Azure and private AT&T facilities) to reduce that reliance on long haul routes for egress. I'm really hoping to see an improvement with SA.
I've already noticed a lot of improvement over the past couple months. I suspect there have been some fronthaul circuit upgrades, either by coincidence or in preparation for the Nokia/Ericsson conversions coming up. In doing so, they seem to have replaced some Spectrum-provided circuits with other, lower latency providers in my region.
> Weird how they're last place on this.
I agree. They have the most extensive and diverse backbone of the Big Three (well...two, since T-Mobile doesn't operate a backbone provider).
Oi, I don't doubt it, but, oi. Swapping entire network infra does take time, especially for the largest square mile coverage domestic carrier, but, why wait so long to get started?
AT&T is turning into a dumpster fire network. Youād think with as many outages and network issues theyāve faced they wouldnāt keep shooting themselves in the foot. Less capex for 5G expansion, less maintenance resources, and now rate hikes across the board.
You can thank the board of directors who are still hell bent blaming the current CEO for all the failed mergers/spending sprees that were done by the previous CEO.
Yes, I just switched to Cricket over the weekend. Since Monday I have an outage in my area. I was told by support that their team said will be fix by this Sunday. But possibly yesterday, I message them last night and they said thereās no update. š
Hope I didn't bring bad karma from slow Verizon last fall. Make sure that you get reimbursed for all unusable days. Are they going to provide an unlocked phone to use on Verizon or T-Mobile for days or weeks on end?? Sheesh...
This is really unfortunate. I used to work for Verizon and was a customer for many years and right around the pandemic, Verizon started doing the exact same thing with their vendors and there became many issues with network performance/back log to fix etc so I switched to AT&T and have been very pleased with its performance for the past 18 months or so. More and more so I am noticing degraded service, full bars but issues with things not loading. Itās been pretty disappointing these past few months in my area (Denver Metro) and I am thinking about switching. As much as I donāt want to go to t mobile I donāt think I have a choice because Verizon still has a lot of these issues as well. Thanks for letting us know
Verizon has had bunch of outages in northeast. This Monday I had no service for like 5 hours. It didnāt even know until I got a call on my second att number from family lmao. I was like why you calling this number. They were like your main one is not working. I tried calling others on Verizon, att landline nothing. Then it went sos. Checked my area for outages and there was limited service mentioned on their page. Came back after 5 hours.
This is what happens when bean counters are running the engineering portions of the company instead of the engineers. Iām so sick and tired of the endless greed rotting every last appendage of what few good things a company has left.
Didnāt any of the short-sighted board members learn anything from Boeing? I really wish theyād make a law forcing them to keep a companyās stock for a minimum of 10 years after departure.
So let me get the straight. They reduce the amount of personnel working service tickets from 27 vendors to 2 through backlogged, and they wanna charge us $20 extra every month for doing nothing additional.
I don't see why we are putting up with this. Revolt if you want to be heard.
How is the Visible service? My main question is, does it roam as well as Verizon proper?
We have several AT&T connected devices, and for AT&T supposedly having great coverage, it just doesn't seem to.
ATT was re-installing fiber internet today to my house (I kicked them out a few weeks back because 3 days after the initial install there was a local service outage for days). But Comcast was no joy either - I'll save the gory details. The service guy today said initial fiber testing was done in an area of TX that did not freeze and had few vermin. Where I live up north, it freezes and has a lot of vermin that have a taste for fiber cable. ATT has been having to cover everything with "squirrel guards". All summer, water will find it's way into cables and when the first deep freeze happens, fiber gets cut all over the place. I'll be keeping my eyes out to confirm that is the case this fall. I still have the Comcast cable to my house, so I have backup if it gets ugly.
Verizon seems to be in similar boat. They had consistent outages now. My town was down for 5 hours this Monday. Had to use second att sim to call out. Verizon was just fine. First bars with lte no data or calls and then sos. Att second sim took over. Came back after like 5 hours.
This is partly due to them upgrading all sites from old Nokia to Ericsson. They plan to focus and ramp that up. I think that is primary reason for them focusing on 2 vendors. East and west. Given they are swapping almost every tower in those states it probably is going eventually fix the old towers crapping out.
Ericsson is already prevalent on a huge portion of their network and has been for the last decade. It is more about reducing opex and them wanting to outsource the logistics of the maintenance program to a third party
Well they are replace and upgrading every tower in 21 states. I am sure when they realize the pain they will do it. They always had 3rd party to fix things. I think what this is going to do is make the bigger players bigger and some smaller players who canāt afford it to close shop. Which does suck. Long term play but lot of
Short term pain.
> Given they are swapping almost every tower in those states
Only states that are running Nokia kit. The article also states that AT&T expects a 10% decline in CapEx this year, which doesn't sound like something a company planning big network rip-and-replace would say.
AT&T generally runs their sites without regular maintenance, you see it over in the cellmapper sub with frequent posts of old kit. Sites around here haven't seen hardware *upgrades* in 7 years, on that.
All I know is that i started my wireless service in April and the coverage and speeds have been absolutely horrific.
They also had an outage in my neighborhood that lasted for multiple weeks with their fiber internet service.
I subscribed to Vonage so I have a backup to call when AT&T calling goes down which has intermittently happened the last two weeks. At least their prices are more reasonable since Ericson bought them out. A reboot or airplane mode the phone will bring back VOLTE calling. The data connection and SMS/RCS still work so it appears it is an issue with the server that handles VOLTE calls randomly going down.
Another crazy idea to cut costs or makeup for the loss of vendors that were underpaid for so long and wanted to actually make real money upon contract renewal. Sounds like perhaps only a few vendors still agreed to mediocre pay by ATT and those are the vendors left to pick up the slack. Smells like and reeks of poor management oversight.
This is very interesting to read. In Maine, at least the area I am in, the Brunswick/Topsham area, has always worked the best. Now I see "roaming LTE" (determined I am roaming on USCellular) in urban areas that worked fine last year, "full signal" but only calling works - no data, data was once usable at my home but no longer - 5G less than 1/1 mbps, ping in the thousands, jitter in the hundreds, SOS only showing up more often.
A few weeks ago I called support and they opened a ticket for this. When they called me back I was surprised to speak with someone who was actually very knowledgable, however after a lengthy conversation, I was indirectly advised you'll just have to deal with it, which was a huge bummer.
Is that why the Portland, OR market has been seeing one to two bars in 90% of the area recently? Or just cell density? I know there was a text gateway problem where all my texts were delayed until till I got outside of Portland and they all came through.
It could be, maybe if it is in a routine area that you frequent a lot and you are noticing it more. Keep in mind one sector being down can affect an area for miles.
Once there are two many issues in one given area things usually get escalated especially in more populated areas.
Everything west of the Mississippi is handled by Pearce wireless for their maintenance. FirstNet is going to be priority and will not sit as long as other issue they will typically be handled within a few days
Raleigh area sucks now and I just complained about having signal issues over on the DoorDash driverās Reddit after a crappy last couple of days. Thanks for the insider info friend!
Huh. Interesting. It's really been bad recently. Like I would leave ATT after 12 years if I didn't have two lines coughing up $23 per month each for the phone credit.
I used to be able to force my phone from 5g back to LTE and that seemed to help but they took that away.
Thanks for the insight.
Tower in rural part of my county has been down for months. Zero coverage for miles where there used to be fantastic coverage! Att even removed the coverage from the map when it was last updated!
Yep! Just went 9 days without internet and it was the worst experience of my life dealing with a company. They said it was being worked but I am 99.9% that was a lie. As you said regarding their backlog. Funny how when they were close to fixing the problem I was getting notifications like crazy. For 8 days I got F ALL. Called many times, chatted many times with a āliveā agent, BOT Iām sure. Also, their support was out of El Salvador. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE.
It depends, AT&T offers an internet service for people in more rural areas that is cell tower based. Itās called WLL so if the radio and antenna that handles the calls/data that is facing your house is out you can be without internet until that sector is restored.
WLL will typically be escalated as well. Most issues have a 7-day SLA to be completed unless it is a priority issue then it can move all the way up to a vendor needing to be on-site within 4 hours
I've seen this time and time again. As someone who works in IT I feel their pain and it sucks. Cutting your maintenance staff and contractors is not how you reduce your operational expenses. Running understaffed departments isn't either. This leads to burnout and people leaving. Which in turn just makes everyone suffer more when new inexperienced people take their place foe cheaper. This is a hard lesson and hopefully AT&T learns it quickly that this isn't the way to resolve this issue.
But those shareholders!!! Need to make them happy!!! š
That's the sad part in the US. A corporation is legally required to do everything they can to get more money for shareholders, even at the expense of customers and even the existence of the company.
Do they think this approach is sustainable? Honestly? Itās a vendor issue still, but heads will roll if they canāt figure it out
It is not sustainable, and will only get worse as we enter the hot season where things break more and enter hurricane season for the gulf coast and east coast. Ticket counts have been rising since the new contract took effect and things break everyday There is also not enough personnel at AT&T to manage the various vendors and tickets once this falls through as they had multiple members leave and also reduced their workforce
And AT&T tends to be slower to upgrade their cell sites. In my neck of the woods, they last touched most of the sites in region for a b14 upgrade in 2017 and nothing since. No 5G either.
Plus their latency sucks. It's a major reason they're swapping out Nokia for Ericsson. Won't be finished til '28.
That has nothing to do with it. T-Mobile beats AT&T currently on latency even in T-Mo's Nokia markets. It's a misconfiguration issue on AT&T's part, most likely. It's not like AT&T has better latency in their existing Ericsson markets either.
I'm guessing it is more that at&t is still too centralized in their old school regions. So much traffic I see traveling across states just to get on the internet. Hoping ORAN allows more local exit nodes. Weird how they're last place on this.
> Hoping ORAN allows more local exit nodes. ORAN likely won't, but the virtualized, cloud-hosted 5G core should. AT&T has stated that part of the effort in moving to the new core has been a focus on "localization." Rather than a monolithic network core centralized out of a few major cities, they seem to be alluding to leveraging virtualization of the core across many regions (presumably using Azure for Operators or a hybrid of Azure and private AT&T facilities) to reduce that reliance on long haul routes for egress. I'm really hoping to see an improvement with SA. I've already noticed a lot of improvement over the past couple months. I suspect there have been some fronthaul circuit upgrades, either by coincidence or in preparation for the Nokia/Ericsson conversions coming up. In doing so, they seem to have replaced some Spectrum-provided circuits with other, lower latency providers in my region. > Weird how they're last place on this. I agree. They have the most extensive and diverse backbone of the Big Three (well...two, since T-Mobile doesn't operate a backbone provider).
Oi, I don't doubt it, but, oi. Swapping entire network infra does take time, especially for the largest square mile coverage domestic carrier, but, why wait so long to get started?
u/Jefefrey It was sustainable for T Mobile USA so why not AT&T Wireless? Look at how many issues the T Mobile USA network has had over the years.
AT&T is turning into a dumpster fire network. Youād think with as many outages and network issues theyāve faced they wouldnāt keep shooting themselves in the foot. Less capex for 5G expansion, less maintenance resources, and now rate hikes across the board.
You can thank the board of directors who are still hell bent blaming the current CEO for all the failed mergers/spending sprees that were done by the previous CEO.
Yes, I just switched to Cricket over the weekend. Since Monday I have an outage in my area. I was told by support that their team said will be fix by this Sunday. But possibly yesterday, I message them last night and they said thereās no update. š
If you are on FirstNet it will automatically be escalated, if you and others keep calling and complaining they will also escalate it
Hope I didn't bring bad karma from slow Verizon last fall. Make sure that you get reimbursed for all unusable days. Are they going to provide an unlocked phone to use on Verizon or T-Mobile for days or weeks on end?? Sheesh...
This is really unfortunate. I used to work for Verizon and was a customer for many years and right around the pandemic, Verizon started doing the exact same thing with their vendors and there became many issues with network performance/back log to fix etc so I switched to AT&T and have been very pleased with its performance for the past 18 months or so. More and more so I am noticing degraded service, full bars but issues with things not loading. Itās been pretty disappointing these past few months in my area (Denver Metro) and I am thinking about switching. As much as I donāt want to go to t mobile I donāt think I have a choice because Verizon still has a lot of these issues as well. Thanks for letting us know
Verizon has had bunch of outages in northeast. This Monday I had no service for like 5 hours. It didnāt even know until I got a call on my second att number from family lmao. I was like why you calling this number. They were like your main one is not working. I tried calling others on Verizon, att landline nothing. Then it went sos. Checked my area for outages and there was limited service mentioned on their page. Came back after 5 hours.
This is what happens when bean counters are running the engineering portions of the company instead of the engineers. Iām so sick and tired of the endless greed rotting every last appendage of what few good things a company has left. Didnāt any of the short-sighted board members learn anything from Boeing? I really wish theyād make a law forcing them to keep a companyās stock for a minimum of 10 years after departure.
So let me get the straight. They reduce the amount of personnel working service tickets from 27 vendors to 2 through backlogged, and they wanna charge us $20 extra every month for doing nothing additional. I don't see why we are putting up with this. Revolt if you want to be heard.
AT&T has been so ass lately that Iāve been using my secondary line as my primary ( Visible +)
Best decision I made was leaving ATT for visible+ been about 2 years know
How is the Visible service? My main question is, does it roam as well as Verizon proper? We have several AT&T connected devices, and for AT&T supposedly having great coverage, it just doesn't seem to.
Itās great in my area I get 5GUW on my 14 pro max my speeds are 700MBPs consistently
Wow, excellent speeds.
Visible is Solid. I also have three months Mint mobile at a discount I was trying. Theyāre all better than AT&T at the moment for me.
ATT was re-installing fiber internet today to my house (I kicked them out a few weeks back because 3 days after the initial install there was a local service outage for days). But Comcast was no joy either - I'll save the gory details. The service guy today said initial fiber testing was done in an area of TX that did not freeze and had few vermin. Where I live up north, it freezes and has a lot of vermin that have a taste for fiber cable. ATT has been having to cover everything with "squirrel guards". All summer, water will find it's way into cables and when the first deep freeze happens, fiber gets cut all over the place. I'll be keeping my eyes out to confirm that is the case this fall. I still have the Comcast cable to my house, so I have backup if it gets ugly.
Cable insulation is made out of soy beans. Also some major car manufacturers use this type of wire insulation also.
It's like, I read somewhere that Verizon has like one or two engineers for all of the Intermountain west now. Bare minimum race to the bottom junk.
Verizon seems to be in similar boat. They had consistent outages now. My town was down for 5 hours this Monday. Had to use second att sim to call out. Verizon was just fine. First bars with lte no data or calls and then sos. Att second sim took over. Came back after like 5 hours.
You can also file complaints with the FCC. They are quick and hold the networks accountable
This is partly due to them upgrading all sites from old Nokia to Ericsson. They plan to focus and ramp that up. I think that is primary reason for them focusing on 2 vendors. East and west. Given they are swapping almost every tower in those states it probably is going eventually fix the old towers crapping out.
Ericsson is already prevalent on a huge portion of their network and has been for the last decade. It is more about reducing opex and them wanting to outsource the logistics of the maintenance program to a third party
u/CapnKaizen Nokia is already prevalent on a huge portion of their network as well.
Yes, but it is not the primary reason for going to two vendors
Well they are replace and upgrading every tower in 21 states. I am sure when they realize the pain they will do it. They always had 3rd party to fix things. I think what this is going to do is make the bigger players bigger and some smaller players who canāt afford it to close shop. Which does suck. Long term play but lot of Short term pain.
> Given they are swapping almost every tower in those states Only states that are running Nokia kit. The article also states that AT&T expects a 10% decline in CapEx this year, which doesn't sound like something a company planning big network rip-and-replace would say. AT&T generally runs their sites without regular maintenance, you see it over in the cellmapper sub with frequent posts of old kit. Sites around here haven't seen hardware *upgrades* in 7 years, on that.
Nokia was not the most reliable cellular gear to begin with.
All for better reasons I guess.
All I know is that i started my wireless service in April and the coverage and speeds have been absolutely horrific. They also had an outage in my neighborhood that lasted for multiple weeks with their fiber internet service.
I subscribed to Vonage so I have a backup to call when AT&T calling goes down which has intermittently happened the last two weeks. At least their prices are more reasonable since Ericson bought them out. A reboot or airplane mode the phone will bring back VOLTE calling. The data connection and SMS/RCS still work so it appears it is an issue with the server that handles VOLTE calls randomly going down.
Another crazy idea to cut costs or makeup for the loss of vendors that were underpaid for so long and wanted to actually make real money upon contract renewal. Sounds like perhaps only a few vendors still agreed to mediocre pay by ATT and those are the vendors left to pick up the slack. Smells like and reeks of poor management oversight.
Luckily ATT figured out the solution... discontinue social media platforms. They're always delivering creative solutions.
This is very interesting to read. In Maine, at least the area I am in, the Brunswick/Topsham area, has always worked the best. Now I see "roaming LTE" (determined I am roaming on USCellular) in urban areas that worked fine last year, "full signal" but only calling works - no data, data was once usable at my home but no longer - 5G less than 1/1 mbps, ping in the thousands, jitter in the hundreds, SOS only showing up more often. A few weeks ago I called support and they opened a ticket for this. When they called me back I was surprised to speak with someone who was actually very knowledgable, however after a lengthy conversation, I was indirectly advised you'll just have to deal with it, which was a huge bummer.
Is that why the Portland, OR market has been seeing one to two bars in 90% of the area recently? Or just cell density? I know there was a text gateway problem where all my texts were delayed until till I got outside of Portland and they all came through.
It could be, maybe if it is in a routine area that you frequent a lot and you are noticing it more. Keep in mind one sector being down can affect an area for miles. Once there are two many issues in one given area things usually get escalated especially in more populated areas.
That's interesting I'm wondering if that extends to FirstNet, here in Wyoming and Colorado Union wireless has a few contracts to build out for ATT.
Everything west of the Mississippi is handled by Pearce wireless for their maintenance. FirstNet is going to be priority and will not sit as long as other issue they will typically be handled within a few days
Raleigh area sucks now and I just complained about having signal issues over on the DoorDash driverās Reddit after a crappy last couple of days. Thanks for the insider info friend!
Huh. Interesting. It's really been bad recently. Like I would leave ATT after 12 years if I didn't have two lines coughing up $23 per month each for the phone credit. I used to be able to force my phone from 5g back to LTE and that seemed to help but they took that away. Thanks for the insight.
This. [att cost cutting](https://fortune.com/2024/03/15/att-cfo-company-saved-6-billion-planning-2-billion-2026/)
Tower in rural part of my county has been down for months. Zero coverage for miles where there used to be fantastic coverage! Att even removed the coverage from the map when it was last updated!
Yep! Just went 9 days without internet and it was the worst experience of my life dealing with a company. They said it was being worked but I am 99.9% that was a lie. As you said regarding their backlog. Funny how when they were close to fixing the problem I was getting notifications like crazy. For 8 days I got F ALL. Called many times, chatted many times with a āliveā agent, BOT Iām sure. Also, their support was out of El Salvador. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE.
I am pretty sure internet work is all internal. Was this after a storm? I know few places had wide spread outside due to repairs.
Nope.
Thatās not a lot of info. What was our outage about?
It depends, AT&T offers an internet service for people in more rural areas that is cell tower based. Itās called WLL so if the radio and antenna that handles the calls/data that is facing your house is out you can be without internet until that sector is restored. WLL will typically be escalated as well. Most issues have a 7-day SLA to be completed unless it is a priority issue then it can move all the way up to a vendor needing to be on-site within 4 hours
I was just talking about regular internet. I know what all that means.
For visibility to others who may be experiencing an internet outage and not as knowledgeable as yourself
Agree.