Web'n'Walk falls over Punters in the north of England using T-Mobile lost all data connectivity yesterday for around 12 hours, but the company says that's OK because it was mainly during the night and northerners are all tucked up in bed by six. All connections, including Web'n'Walk, went down at around 17.30 because of a power failure and didn't …
Bullpuckies! Spent most of yesterday day time, at least from 10am onwards getting the informative "T-Mobile Bad Gateway" when trying to get on the web. Whilst the unavailability was not massively significant for me personally, suggesting that the timing of the failure excuses the impact isn't terribly impressive.
Presumably T-Mobiles head office is just outside Tokyo accounting for the outage being "mainly during the night".
I was one of those effective and it seems like T-Mobile have a funny idea of 12 hours. My web'n'walk was down from Sunday afternoon and all day Monday. I have had reports of outages in Manchester and Edinburgh, although their's seems to have been fixed quicker, leaving us Scousers to suffer.
Nice one T-Mobile seeing the city is full of Tourists at the moment for Capital of Culture.
Are they kidding?
I'm in Sheffield and it was not working ALL DAY yesterday.
I should clarify, the 3/3.5G connection was working but their transparent proxy just kept spitting out 502 errors so I couldn't use the damn browser. As of very soon I'll set up ACLd squid at home on some bizarre port and hopefully avoid this in future.
Web'n'Walk was down for a lot longer than that - yesterday I couldn't get a connection at 930AM, or all day.
And, as a proud Mancunian, could I just say that possibly the only worse insult would have been to refer to me (and the rest of us) a "Southerners"! ;)
Mines the nomex jacket, thanks...
How T-Mobile have managed to avoid bad press and bad blog recently amazes me. My web'n'walk around Leeds has had completely unpredictable QoS since end of April. Customer services breathed something about service improvement soon and I was reduced to 2G to get a connection at all. After 3 weeks of worse than dial-up speeds, they next advised to take the dongle to a shop for a firmware upgrade. This restored some semblance of broadband, but I still have issues - dropping out of high speed mode, dropping connections, connecting but not xferring, or simply not connecting - all unpredictable. After they cut prices last autumn by 50% and left me with 5 months to run at the old price I swore I'd ditch them when my contract ran out. When the time came, they, 3 and voda were doing same price deals, but the latter two had much worse excess charges, 3 especially being punitive. Why stay? Well, the free wi-fi hot-spots must be worth something sometime, and I managed to negotiate a 12 month deal instead of the usual 18 month. Only 9 months to go. Yet the thing worked 98% of last year - until the Reg reported that their 50% price drop produced a 700% customer increase. Less jam to go around? That's were it's odd, because someone in the know tells me their pipes are plenty fat enough (so the data "limits" are there for commercial not technical reasons). Why the fubar T-Mobile?
Was down for me all the way from just North of Manchester to North Yorkshire. No explanation - looked like it was OK. I just couldn't get any traffic info and kept getting annoying messages from CoPilot!
But they could do better. Take a leaf out of Plusnet's book and be open and honest about outages.
Also their billing system is extemely suspect and charged me for messages left (but not retrieved) on voicemail when I was in the US at Easter. They claim that because my phone was switched on whilst I was there (once not all the time!) - I have to pay for the divert of all calls from the UK to my mobile in the US and then pay again for the cost of sending the call back to the UK to the Voicemail Server! Have you ever heard such tripe!
If someone had called me and I didn't answer they would not be allowed to charge me under Offcom rules but because I had a divert to VM on no answer they charge me twice!
I live in the south east and my MMS/Internet was from Sunday evening and most of the day Monday, well until about 8... well I just happen to try again at 8 so it might have been earlier.
I even considered cancelling my web and walk. After 6 months or so, unlimited data looses its "wow" factor.
North Wales had similar problems, well Prestatyn area.
Much of Sunday 3G would not authenticate at all. Forcing a 2G connection worked but was of course slow.
It improved on Monday but the proxy was having problems before and after then: the T-mobile proxy reduces image quality among other things and nothing was getting through.
T-mobile internet has been going down hill for some time. The dongles only intermittently connect using HSPDA and then switch to 3G and wont let any data through. Connections then timeout for a few seconds and may recover for a bit.
Latency makes any kind of interactive work impossible most of the time.
Presumably they kick off internet users when there is a bigger demand for voice calls, which they make more money out of.
I was trying to get on from 8am, called them at 9 and was advised of the problem. Just kept trying it every half hour. Wasn't working for me at 10:30, was again at 11. Still didn't work properly (Missing Images, slow loading pages) until gone 3pm. Ctrl+F5ing pages got everything back again, but it was annoying.
My handset is up for renewal this week, i've just ordered one on Orange instead of T-Mobile. After repeated patchy service round Lancashire and Cumbria i've had enough.
I'm in Preston, so granted not a million miles away from Liverpool, but hardly scouse. Fell over for me sometime on Sunday afternoon, and I wasn't aware it had come back unti early Monday PM - OK I know that's at odds with the implication in my title.
BUT..
Until about Easter the service was pretty rock solid, any glitches I suffered could be cured with a reboot of the handset. Since then, I get 502 gateway errors a lot. They come in patches too, so if I've had one and don't give up then more are likely. That makes me think there's a capacity issue somewhere, as worse case scenario I'll get one in three pages fail, best case I'll not have problems for a couple of days. There was another similar weekend outage 3 or 4 weeks back, and while working in nearby Bolton I've seen the 3g network vanish for hours at a time during the working week - makes me think that it's planned work - after all I suspect Sunday is less likely to impact on important business customers.
It seems to me that they are doing some work on their network, and that would be fine if they would say "we're upgrading such and such to cope with demand - you might have small outages until xx". But no. Every network outage is reluctantly acknowledged, always with an estimated repair time of "next day". Is the network merger with 3 underway yet?
And as for pursuing the 502 errors? All they ever do in response to that is re-send me my settings in case I've changed them, in spite of my insistances to the contrary, and my insistance that it's an ongoing problem.
</rant> ports number out tomorrow after cancelling contract early due to 08x price rises.
I haven't been able to get a usable connection in my town (north of Leeds, next to the airport) for weeks. There is never any capacity in London when I'm there and it's pot luck in central Manchester. This has been going on for getting on for 18 months. If you're going to promote a data service, make sure you can meet the demand.
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