26 August 2011 04:30 PM EST: AT&T’s vast cellular coverage network in South Florida, encompassing Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, has failed today for a second time this year. At approximately 11:00 AM EST, the service was interrupted in the Miami area for all smartphone users on 3G and 4G networks. A call to AT&T yielded little help, with the customer service agent first stating there was no known outage, and then stating there is a known outage but unable to elaborate further. Thankfully, cell service was reinstated shortly thereafter at around 12:30 PM EST.
At 03:45 PM EST, the service was again down, however this time all AT&T users were affected, as service was unavailable even without using 3G or 4G service. Several news outlets state that the outages are due to “cell-tower” maintenance, however AT&T customer service representatives are still unable to confirm this. AT&T’s customer service department has also stated they will not be issuing refunds to customers for this outage, as they did last time, stating they have in their service agreements that the service is not guaranteed 100% and that it will be back up shortly.
If you have an iPhone, you can try disabling the 3G network to see if this will give you access to telephone and voicemail. After several tries personally, this is not foolproof and seems to only work sometimes, but is worth a try.
On your iPhone, choose “Settings” from the home page. Scroll down to “General”, select and scroll to “Network.” Here you should see an on/off button labeled “Enable 3G.” Slide the button to “Off” and test your phone. If you are still unable to make calls, receive calls or check voicemail, try restarting the phone. If this fails, then unfortunately the entire network is down in your area and only AT&T’s repairs will make a difference.
In other news, several other carriers, including Sprint, Verizon and possibly T-Mobile, will be carrying the iPhone 5 this fall. The iPhone 5 is scheduled to be launched (according to unverified rumors) sometime next month, September 2011. Here’s to hoping that the iPhone 5 on new networks will weed out any unreliable service issues.
The last time AT&T’s service went down in Miami in June 2011, there was wide-spread pandemonium and many users were able to receive refunds for the outages. The outage lasted four hours and was confirmed by AT&T to be an issue with network upgrades.
Ashley Morgan - Ashley Morgan is a freelance writer living in Miami, FL. She grew up in the travel and hospitality industries, with a travel agency and ...
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