AT&T data network fails for BlackBerry, iPhone users
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InfoWorld - AT&T's wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. are down, causing BlackBerry and iPhone users to be without data services.
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Customers of AT&T Inc.'s premium television service, U-verse, were hit with outages Sunday throughout the 33 markets where it's available, the company has confirmed.
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NEW YORK -- An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America.
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Beginning at around 5:30 EST on Thursday, AT&T's EDGE and UMTS data networks went down for reasons even now unknown to company technicians.
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Unlike AT&T, Verizon wonât monitor its network to block unauthorized copying. That would violate customer privacy, it says, and would be expensive too.
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Research In Motion acknowledged an outage left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.
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InfoWorld - Apple&#39;s&#160;iPhone launch&#160;has been marred by delays in AT&amp;T&#39;s phone activation system, leaving some people unable to use their new toy throughout the weekend.
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NEW YORK -- BlackBerry smart phones have lost service across the United States, wireless carriers said Monday.
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User groups said some customers waited nearly 60 hours without getting the iPhone activated, but AT&T and Apple said the problem affects only a small number of customers.
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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AT&T data customers across the country were reporting issues in accessing the EDGE network on Monday, although the company was able to restore service by 7pm Eastern. Technicians continue to work on the problem.
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Hackers have broken the chains that bind iPhone users to AT&amp;T. Will lawyers be the next ones on the line?
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A special kind of upgrade Vodafone's BlackBerry customers have been forced to collect all their email on their BlackBerries after an upgrade last weekend (September 23/24) put the web email service out of action.â¦
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Some smartphone AT&T subscribers have been experiencing difficulty accessing the company's 3G and EDGE data services since 6:30 a.m. EST.
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BlackBerry mobile data services were disrupted Monday afternoon due to a problem with Research In Motion&#39;s infrastructure, apparently affecting customers of all major North American mobile operators, an AT&amp;T Wireless spokesman said.RIM told AT&amp;T the problem began at about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time and that the Waterloo, Ontario, company was working to identify and solve the problem, said AT&amp;T spokesman Mark Siegel. RIM officials were not immediately available for comment.After 6 p.m. Eastern, users on a BlackBerry Internet message board began reporting that service had returned to normal.The popular smart phones rely on both a cellular network for transport and RIM&#39;s own network for pushing e-mail to end-users. Last month, problems with AT&amp;T&#39;s network disrupted service to some of its subscribers with BlackBerrys, as well as iPhone users.Several users on various mobile networks reported connection problems on Monday afternoon on the message board.BlackBerry users may not be able to send or receive messages, browse the Internet, or use the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site, according to a message from RIM that some users on the board posted. In addition, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may not be able to connect to RIM&#39;s infrastructure, and carriers and resellers may not be able to create accounts or provision services, the notice said. The outage happened because &quot;a component of the network infrastructure is experiencing a service interruption.&quot;Zenprise, a maker of service management software that monitors BlackBerry service and notifies administrators of problems, detected the outage and notified customers at 3:23 p.m. Eastern, according to Ahmed Datoo, Zenprise&#39;s vice president of marketing. After running a series of tests, Zenprise determined that the root of the problem was in RIM&#39;s infrastructure. The Fremont, California, company, which counts about 100 enterprises and SMBs among its customers, has not determined the total scope of the outage. BlackBerry service for Zenprise&#39;s own customers has been going up and down during the outage, Datoo said.
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Blog: It turns out Apple's new device wasn't the culprit for wireless network outages at Duke University, as reports alleged earlier this week.
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Email and Internet service to notoriously addictive BlackBerry cellphones in North America stopped working for several hours on Monday.