One of our field agents recently noted that one of ATTWS's LA CDPD towers suddenly stopped working, ie, there was a good, clean -62 Decibel signal on Sunday afternoon and suddenly, after a brief rain, it stopped working. The tower covers an area comprising Diamond Bar, La Puente, parts of the City of Industry, and the CA-57 (Orange), CA-60 (Pomona) and I-10 (San Bernardino) Freeways. The agent, Bill, called AT&T Wireless Data Support at (800) 552-3373, explained the nature of the problem, that it happened suddenly, that it was working fine (well, as "fine" as you can get in AT&T's inferior LA CDPD system -- they run it is badly as BAMS runs the NY Metro system -- the modems spend more time sending overhead messages to each other and doing "initializing encryption / awaiting confirmation" than they send any actual data! :) The coverage area is also VERY, VERY limited and unlike other AT&T markets where the CDPD footprint is more or less the same as their analog one, the LA 00027 system has very little CDPD in it's footprint. But this is a new market for AT&T so I've been inclined to give them some time to build out their CDPD service now that they have assumed the market from LA Cellular). After AT&T did some tests, they said "We just need to reboot it and it should be fine in about an hour". So an hour goes by, and nothing. As a matter of fact, it just gets worse. So Bill calls them on Sunday night, and they say "Ok, well, we will send someone to the tower on Monday to check it out." Monday comes, I call Bill and wonder why I can't connect to his laptop, and Bill says they are working on the tower. Monday passes, and no fix. Bill then calls Jackie at ATTWS Data Tech Support, who looks at the trouble ticket, and says "Oh, they did some testing on Monday and then figured out they did indeed need to go to the site but they are waiting for a phone call to set it up" (HUH??) When I heard this from Bill I decided to have someone from our office call them directly and see what is going on. So we called on Weds (and mind you it is 4 days now that the problem has been reported) and they say a tech is there working on it now, and it should be fixed shortly. Weds passes, no service again, and we call them up, and are told that the new equipment has been put it, but the software won't download properly. So on Thurs, getting increasingly fed up with their apparent inability to service and maintain their own network, I call them myself and tell them it's ridiculous how long it is taking them to fix this problem and that we resent being told every day that it would be fixed in a few hours and it obviously isn't. So I talk to one of the managers there (Ben Cox?) and he explained in detail the nature of the problem and why it is taking so long, but said he *thinks* it should be working by Thursday afternoon. So now it is Thursday evening, and still no service at all. At this point, I am demanding a full month's credit for service since this has been a disastrous experience for us, and I am actively looking for some reasonably priced alternative to AT&T's CDPD as a backup should this happen elsewhere. (Perhaps with the BAMS/GTE/Airtouch deal the B-carrier will have CDPD in LA?). Note this is after last month's fiasco where the Allentown, PA (ex-Vanguard) system was totally inaccessible to AT&T customers, which followed the Dec 1999 problem in Portland, ME (also ex-Vanguard) where a gateway machine went down and no one noticed. I'm sure that if it were a cell tower which went down and AT&T WS was loosing $500,000 per day in revenue it would be fixed, but since it is CDPD, it's of apparently very low priority since the results indicate that competent and sufficient manpower is not being devoted to this (and other previous) issues. With service like this, it's no wonder that AT&T's Pocketnet service went/is going nowhere, and why so many people have just given up on CDPD. If the largest and staunchest developer and promoter of CDPD takes a WEEK to get a tower working again (at a very busy intersection of two major freeways) I can't see why anyone would choose to rely on AT&T's CDPD/Pocketnet service -- and this is because we TOLD them about it and keep hounding them to get it fixed -- I can only imaging how long it would take if we left them to correct in at their own pace! (In all fairness, the people at AT&T Data are very nice and pleasant, but they seem ineffectual, and despite their trouble tickets and escalation of issues, can't seem to muster up sufficient resources and authority to ensure that an entire tower which has failed is immediately corrected, let alone let inoperative for a week!) They have a lot of work to do in terms of responsiveness and network robustness if they ever expect CDPD/Pocketnet to catch on beyond people who strongly desire such service, because and this level (or lack of) support, it is unlikely that most customers would put up with such extended downtime with no end or resolution in sight. (This post and other cellular/CDPD posts and issues are also available at: http://www.wirelessnotes.org)