Saturday, February 2, 2008

AT&T Data Network Fails for BlackBerry, iPhone Users


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.

The EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) services in those regions began having problems around 6:30 a.m. EST this morning, said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman. Voice calling has not been affected, but people trying to use wireless data services might have "difficulty," he said.

Several users of a BlackBerry newsgroup have reported being unable to receive data to their handsets. A systems administrator in Kansasreportsthat BlackBerry devices there are displaying a message that says "data connection refused."

The problem had been fixed by about 4 p.m. ET, Siegel   said. AT&T is still trying to identify the exact cause of the outage.

The iPhone runs on the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any other mobile device that receives data from either of the networks, will have problems using data services.

In early 2007, Research In Motion implemented a software upgrade that caused its systems to crash, resulting in a BlackBerry service outage that started in the evening and lasted through the night. This time, the problem appears to be with AT&T's network and not with RIM's infrastructure.

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