Still have problems sending text messages
Just got a "text not sent" message trying to confirm a doctor's appointment. This was around 1:35 am GMT.
T-Mobile US is suffering a nationwide technical breakdown, preventing customers from receiving calls and knackering data connections. We understand not only are incoming calls being black-holed, but some subscribers saw their connectivity downgraded from LTE to HSPDA when trying to make calls, and encountered busy circuit …
See the linked-to article in the story. Un-carrier is T-Mobile US's slogan to distance itself from the other main carriers. As in, it won't treat you badly like the big players, and will offer you features the others can't, allegedly.
In America, T-Mobile US is third place to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, pre-Sprint merger.
C.
"...won't treat you badly like the big players..."
Bollocks. We were trying to upgrade phones back in the day* and were treated like utter crap. Their offerings were horrible, the extra upgrade fees extortionist, and they had no sense of maintaining any kind of customer loyalty.
We switched to Verizon, which was marginally better on both performance and service.
* I'd like to say it was autumn 2011. I know we went through two 2-year cycles with Big Red V. We had T-Mobile together since February 2006 -- the missus even longer than that (we were still dating at the time).
Later (autumn 2015) we switched to AT&T -- they gave us a load of bill credits for transferring numbers and I liked their new billing scheme -- and both metrics did not decrease (didn't really increase either).
YMMV.
They came up with it after that, and probably after the failed merger with AT&T when they started going after marketshare by offering "unlimited" deals, in comparison with the eye-wateringly expensive deals of the other networks. This was successful enough to make Sprint want to merge.
"They were making some changes to their network configurations today. Unfortunately, it went badly. The result has been for around the last six hours a series of cascading failures for their users, impacting both their voice and data networks."
Ouch. That last paragraph just brought some bad flashbacks to my days of working in a data center when changes would go horribly wrong and the subsequent life-draining marathon of hours required to restore services. We made all changes on the weekends however to minimize business impact so I would like to know why they would do it on a Monday morning.
Oddly, looking at the Downdetector home page, the problem report curves for Metro, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, US Cellular, Consumer Cellular, Century Link, Mint, and Cricket all look strangely similar. Even Google and YouTube have the same general shape: all have a sudden peak at around 15.00 - 16.00 on 15 June, gradually tapering off.
In the morning on Mint (T-Mo MVNO) on the 15th I had text messages not send, then things began to work within an hour, then early afternoon phone calling kept being interrupted. One person said they hit a blank when trying to call, nothing at all.
Swapped in a VZW SIM mid-afternoon and calling was fine, texting was fine.
Now back on Mint because better speed, VZW is getting lazy on my connection, I think it's because I'm a long-time customer, although that is about to end.
Anyone have a recommendation for a prepay VZW MVNO? I'd like a backup to rarely use when I need remote coverage.