Wireless phone service down for all carriers across swaths of Southeast

Times Free Press ^ | 8-4-2015 | Various

[tcrlaf]

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile users across the country, but especially in the Southeast reported outages Tuesday afternoon, with reports coming in from California, the midwest U.S. and the Chattanooga region.

Though some users reported that their phones displayed several bars of signal strength, they were still unable to complete calls or use mobile data.

AT&T's outages appeared to be concentrated in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Georgia, with other scattered outages appearing from coast to coast, with T-Mobile users losing service in Huntsville, Alabama, and Louisville, Kentucky.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Mine’s down. Runnin’ om WiFi.

[BenLurkin]

High Desert phone, internet service out
Colin Atagi, The Desert Sun 3:13 p.m. PDT August 4, 2015

“Numerous residents from Morongo Valley to Twentynine Palms say on social media the outage has affected Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T customers. Furthermore, several businesses - including banks - have shut down.”

http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2015/08/04/high-desert-phone-internet/31125705/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=

[cva66snipe]

Knoxville, TN and surrounding areas hit also. I was in the Clinton/Norris area this afternoon and couldn’t call out and dropped calls coming in. Texting is working somewhat though. My daughter is on T-Mobile and was having lots of trouble the past few days.

[minnesota_bound]

#11 From wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections.

[12] The memoir, which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software,[15] and it said of Gates, “He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.”

In an appendix he called DOS “plain and simple theft” because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M’s.[16] He accused IBM of contriving the price difference between PC DOS and CP/M-86 in order to marginalize CP/M.

And that is how Bill Gates became a billionaire.

[moovova]

(Actually had a little trouble getting this thru on my cellphone...)

[cva66snipe]

I recall the days of bliss when once you left the office, you were “offline”. And if you needed to make a call you stopped at a pay phone.

Yeap that's true and after about the sixth one you found one that either wasn't vandalized or actually worked.

Today it’s horror for many to not be connected in the vein to technology.

It has it's positives. My 84 year old mother can go out {we live in a rural area} and go shopping etc and if her car breaks down or something is wrong she can get in touch with me instantly no matter if I'm home or out somewhere. Same thing in her garden if she falls etc. She carries a cell phone with her. Back when my wife was still alive I could leave the house without having to call in a caregiver in so I could run out for a while and do errands. If she had an emergency she could call me on my cell.

I've lost count of the number of times in my rural area I've summoned help for ones stranded, wrecked, etc. They serve a useful purpose. Abuse is up to the user.

[proxy_user]

Latest word:

Update: Sources informed Re/code that AT&T’s landline network is to blame for the ongoing outages, as other telecoms rely on AT&T’s backbone for transporting data. A company representative said AT&T is “investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to restore service.”

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/08/04/cellphone-and-landline-services-down-for-many-in-southeastern-us

[cva66snipe]

Many, many, many, moons ago before the Telco split the southeastern long distance hub was in Alabama in or near Birmingham with smaller hubs tied into it in cities like Knoxville, Atlanta, Nashville, etc.

[Georgia Girl 2]

I’m in GA and was up in the mountains all day looking at property. My ATT cell phone worked fine.

[Spktyr]

Yup. But from that same link:

“IBM approached Digital Research in 1980, at Bill Gates’ suggestion, to negotiate the purchase of a forthcoming version of CP/M called CP/M-86 for the IBM PC. Gary had left negotiations to his wife, Dorothy, as he usually did, while he and colleague Tom Rolander used Gary’s private airplane to deliver software to manufacturer Bill Godbout. Before the IBM representatives would explain the purpose of their visit, they insisted that Dorothy sign a non-disclosure agreement. On the advice of DRI attorney Gerry Davis, Dorothy refused to sign the agreement without Gary’s approval. Gary returned in the afternoon and tried to move the discussion with IBM forward, but accounts disagree on whether he signed the non-disclosure agreement, as well as if he ever met with the IBM representatives.”

Since Gary was out and not reachable by any method, IBM moved on to Bill Gates and the rest was history. If Gary could have been called and given Dorothy the go-ahead, Bill Gates would likely have been an also-ran footnote.