Damned if You Do…

December 8th, 2009, by The Angry Drunk

Since essen­tially Day One of the iPhone saga there have been con­stant com­plaints about AT&T’s ser­vice. While I reject the a pri­ori con­clu­sion that any net­work that merely pos­sesses the prop­erty of “not-AT&T” would nec­es­sar­ily be bet­ter, no one in their right mind would attempt to argue that every­thing has been rain­bows and uni­corn jiz­zum. That’s why it’s heart­en­ing to see things like the email I received recently from AT&T inform­ing me of a new cell tower being deployed in my neigh­bor­hood, or the release of the AT&T Marks the Spot app in the App Store [iTunes link]. It’s a bril­liant idea really, use the power of crowd-sourcing to gather the data needed to effi­ciently upgrade your infra­struc­ture. Scoble must be giddy.

Of course, noth­ing can appease the per­pet­ual whin­ers and AT&T bash­ers; so The Unofficial Apple Web Log ran this turd by Mel Martin yes­ter­day: AT&T offers app so you can report crappy ser­vice. Huh?

The dumb starts quickly:

In one of life’s supreme ironies, AT&T today posted an iPhone app that allows you to report sub­stan­dard ser­vice. That’s right folks. Got a dropped call? No recep­tion? AT&T Marks the Spot … is designed to get that info to your favorite cell com­pany so they can act on it.

Did you have a point there Mel? Because that is exactly what the app is meant to do. How else should AT&T gather the data, fuck­ing car­rier pigeon? Moving on:

Let’s see… I don’t have any recep­tion, so I pull out my new AT&T app to notify them of the prob­lem. Doh! No recep­tion to do that. And the app even nicely brings up a GPS map show­ing where I am. The GPS sig­nal is much more reli­able of course.

Mel’s right, it’s idi­otic of AT&T to not include a way for the report to be stored and then sent once you can access the net­work. Wait, what’s that, the app does allow you to queue up requests so that they can be sent later? Too bad Mel couldn’t be both­ered to actu­ally use the app before attempt­ing to slag on it.

Look, I know AT&T means well, but the app is a tacit admis­sion that all is not well on the AT&T net­work. I know you could travel to some­place with good recep­tion, and send the data to them, but I think this app will rub salt in an already sen­si­tive wound.

Ah so, Mel actu­ally did know that the app queued mes­sages. Why then the point­less para­graph before this one? I know, it’s a shitty attempt at being “snarky.” Also, this isn’t a “tacit” admis­sion of any fuck­ing thing. AT&T has been pretty fuck­ing clear about the fact that the iPhone is over­whelm­ing their net­work. This is an explicit step to begin fix­ing shit.

I’ll skip Mel’s lit­tle bon mot about a pre­vi­ous man­ager air­ing a tele­vi­sion pro­gram to help peo­ple with bad tele­vi­sion recep­tion (oh those pre­cious non-techies, I bet he emails peo­ple to tell them that email is down too) and fin­ish up with the last paragraph.

AT&T says they will acknowl­edge the report with an SMS (and I assume not charge for it) and I truly hope that they use the infor­ma­tion they get to improve the net­work, because if it is just a PR stunt it is likely to back­fire. There are already reports of peo­ple send­ing reports and not get­ting any acknowl­edg­ment. Oh well.

Hey Mel, here’s a clue for you: try not assum­ing and just use the fuck­ing app. It says right on the box that the SMS noti­fi­ca­tions are free. Seriously, has a sys­tem SMS from AT&T ever cost the end user? Moreover, do you really think that AT&T would go through this exer­cise if they didn’t plan on using the data. If they wanted a PR stonewall they could just say, “we’re work­ing on it,” just like they’ve been doing for almost three years. Maybe, instead of writ­ing exe­crable crap like this in a vain effort to appear “edgy”, Mel and TUAW could do some real research and report on actual reality.

Then again, prob­a­bly not.

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  • http://twitter.com/dssstrkl Paul Ward

    Its TUAW. TUAW is retarded and I feel dumber every time I read some­thing from there. What was that about not pok­ing your­self in the eye with a fork?

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    So, I was bored and need to keep my knives sharp.

  • http://twitter.com/boblmartens Bob Martens

    Thanks for the arti­cle. As a per­son switch­ing to the iPhone and hop­ing AT&T can keep up, this brings at least a hint that they are indeed start­ing to “get it.“

    Hope is some­times all we have. :)

  • http://blog.mcgladdery.org/ Kevin

    This might be the first ever attempt to Geolocate rage.

  • sweyhrich

    I’ve got the app and have used it already. My only com­plaint was receiv­ing about six SMS mes­sages from AT&T say­ing that they had received my report. If any­thing, they seem to be a lit­tle TOO enthusiastic.

  • http://twitter.com/cervezamasfina James

    I’m glad you pointed out the many idi­otic com­plaints peo­ple have had with the new AT&T app. I only see this app as a good thing. AT&T has already put great resources towards improv­ing their net­work and the ben­e­fits are already being observed. This app is another step in the right direc­tion towards greatly improv­ing AT&T ser­vice. Many blog­gers and web­sites have shunned this app, made fun of, or dis­missed it all together. This app is a fast, easy, and direct way to com­mu­ni­cate with AT&T regard­ing ser­vice issues. I guess peo­ple just love to hate on Blue/Orange. if Verizon had an app such as this is would be heralded.

  • Maynard Handley

    Given the atro­cious qual­ity of ATT ser­vice at incred­i­bly pre­dictable places (cough LAX cough) it’s hard to believe this will actu­ally lead to much use­ful, as opposed to a des­per­ate attempt to try to mol­lify people.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=771679755 facebook-771679755

    I think the app is a great idea. Unless AT&T deploys a gazil­lion tech­ni­cians to crawl the coun­try look­ing for dead zones, the next best thing is to ask their cus­tomers where the prob­lem areas are.

    Occasionally TUAW has some­thing use­ful but then blog­gers like Mel Martin post some­thing stu­pid, mak­ing me won­der why I bother vis­it­ing the site.

  • art­Mon­ster

    I down­loaded the app and checked out the UI (needs work).. I was sit­ting at my desk at home, no ser­vice prob­lems in this area, but the loca­tion map dropped the pin 3 miles from me, right in the mid­dle of a ceme­tery. If I were super­sti­tious (I am), I would delete this app (I did).

  • Matt

    Carriers with a clue should already be gath­er­ing this same infor­ma­tion (oh wait, it’s called crowd­sourc­ing now) on the back­end side, with­out requir­ing the phone to have an app store, the user to install and use the app, etc. Haven’t they been build­ing this into the infra­struc­ture since for­ever?

    Possessing the not-AT&T prop­erty might not be an a pri­ori indi­ca­tion of supe­ri­or­ity, but in my research I believe the cor­re­la­tion to be near 100%.

  • Martin

    Apple should have worked with AT&T to cre­ate an opt-in sig­nal mon­i­tor. The phone is con­stantly scan­ning, so it can col­lect this infor­ma­tion con­tin­u­ously, map it out using the geo data, and then at the end of a trip tell the user ‘The net­work appeared to be unavail­able for xxx miles/minutes of your trip, would you like to report this to AT&T?’ It could show the user the map that it’s going to send so the user knows what they are dis­clos­ing, and for extra pri­vacy, could be set up as an opt-in ser­vice at the out­set  — par­tic­u­larly if it would have a bat­tery impact to do the extra datalogging/GPS bits. At the very least, I’d expect a lot of peo­ple would turn this on now and then for their com­mute.

    From Apple’s per­spec­tive, flood­ing AT&T with data to demon­strate how shitty their net­work is would be in their self-interest.

  • Matt

    Plus, the prob­lem with AT&T’s cov­er­age isn’t dead zones (which they have, but not so many, and every­one else’s net­works have them too, and it’s not too hard to learn to deal with dead zones — what’s that about rout­ing around prob­lems?) — it’s the zones where the sig­nal phases in and out of exis­tence, where one minute you get a voice­mail noti­fi­ca­tion and you spend the next 30 min­utes in increas­ingly curi­ous para­noia, stab­bing the voice­mail but­ton and get­ting told the ser­vice is unavail­able. Said zones include most of San Francisco, in my expe­ri­ence.

    If it does point out enough really embar­rass­ing spots where cov­er­age lacks (like, right in front of the Soho, NYC Apple Store) maybe it’ll be use­ful though.

    Actually, I’d be a lot more inter­ested in this app if the results were pub­lic… maybe some­one else should have writ­ten it first!

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Cell ser­vice in air­ports sucks, bril­liant obser­va­tion. Curse AT&T, there can’t pos­si­bly be any sort of reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ca­tions involved in build­ing tow­ers in the mid­dle of an airport.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Amazing, you’ve dis­cov­ered that GPS doesn’t work for shit indoors. Have a cookie.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    What you know about RF and how wire­less car­ri­ers man­age their net­works could fill a whole syl­la­ble, per­haps two.

  • Sigivald

    Yeah, uh, how exactly are they sup­posed to KNOW you got poor voice qual­ity or bad data rates? Or that a call dropped unin­ten­tion­ally?

  • http://twitter.com/etandrib Nate Bird

    I stopped vis­it­ing because all the news seems to be scrapped from yes­ter­days news and then rewrote poorly. I haven’t been back in over a year.

  • art­Mon­ster

    Actually it works bet­ter since I had the roof removed. Thanks for lunch too…

  • Kendall

    If you open Google Maps it would have said the same thing. Will you also strive to delete Goolge Maps from your phone?

    GPS takes a minute to accli­mate if you are inside. Just wait a moment and it will be fine. When Google Maps is accu­rate, reopen the app and your loca­tion will be correct.

  • http://twitter.com/MikeTRose Michael T. Rose

    Thanks for the feed­back, Darby & co.

  • art­Mon­ster

    I gave it another chance, down­loaded it.. this time sober. The cookie helped. Works much bet­ter. Feel kind of bad about the roof now though.

  • Punchy

    The only provider offer­ing me worse ser­vice than AT&T is your mom. In bed. Performing oral sex on me. Your mom is poor at giv­ing me oral sex.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    And you are very bad at com­men­tary you gib­ber­ing monkey.

  • http://punkassjim.livejournal.com/ punkassjim

    Here’s another vote for “Mel Martin is unde­ni­ably your worst writer.”

  • http://friendfeed.com/infodriveway Jonathan Holbert

    TUAW, the stu­pid is strong with this one.

  • http://twitter.com/drewthaler Drew Thaler

    I call those “Liar’s Bars”. One of the most frus­trat­ing things I’ve ever seen — your phone tells you it has five bars, and then mag­i­cally drops to zero when you try to make a phone call. Weak sig­nal, fine, I can deal with that. But when a phone tells me that I can use it and I actu­ally can’t, that’s what really gives me the rage.

    With patience I can usu­ally get a slow data con­nec­tion at those times, though. So I’ll give this a shot.

  • jdmuys

    well I tend to agree this app is not the right way to fix issues. come on, the only way for AT&T to iden­tify issues is to ask for users to report them? How about, say, search­ing their logs?

    This reminds me of one of my past ISP who started to inves­ti­gate crashed servers when they had received 3 angry cus­tomer phone calls.

    Crappy

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Thanks for play­ing another excit­ing round of I Have No Fucking Clue What I’m Talking About!

    How, pray tell, are AT&T’s “logs” going to tell them about places with low, but exist­ing con­nec­tiv­ity? Or detect slow data trans­fers short of packet inspec­tion? Or detect audio dis­tor­tion. There’s more to this than dropped calls you simp.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Here’s a hint…what you can tell from the phone:

    sig­nal strength
    S/N
    start/stop times for trans­mis­sions
    Length of trans­mis­sions
    Type of trans­mis­sion, (EDGE, 3G, WIFI, etc.)

    If you get dra­con­ian, (no, not dress­ing like Princess Ardala), and use actual phone call data, you might be able to add:

    Was the call dropped or hung up, but that isn’t really reli­able.

    What it wont’ do crap for is when you can’t down­load a web page unless you’re doing con­tent mon­i­tor­ing, (Who wants AT&T doing that? Right) It won’t tell you what the audio qual­ity of the call was. (just because sig­nal strength is low doesn’t mean the call qual­ity sucked, nor does high strength or good S/N mean the call qual­ity was high. Carrier and Content, 2 dif­fer­ent things).

    Do you really want your phone com­mu­ni­cat­ing to AT&T all the time like that? No? Then fuck­ing think a god­damned minute and real­ize this is the best way to get this infor­ma­tion, because you also get a bet­ter idea of what loca­tions are hav­ing the prob­lems that affect the most peo­ple, and that’s not some­thing that sig­nal strength is going to tell you. Jesus.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    That’s not going to do fuck all good when you have sig­nal, but can’t actu­ally make a con­nec­tion. Signal strength and qual­ity are not the mag­i­cal deter­mi­nants you think they are.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    That’s why you want this appli­ca­tion. It is entirely pos­si­ble to have a strong sig­nal, yet other fac­tors keep you from using it.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    You don’t actu­ally have any tech­ni­cal knowl­edge of this sort of thing, do you.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Now, now, let’s not let lit­tle things like “real­ity” get in the way of brain­less pon­tif­i­ca­tion here. If AT&T doesn’t have the balls to send some loser around ask­ing “Can you here me now?” like Verizon does, then they can just bite me.

  • Chris

    You do real­ize that cell phone tow­ers are just car­rier struc­tures for the anten­nas that do the actual work, right? And that, just like 802.11 anten­nas, cell phone anten­nas do not have to be mounted on a tower in order to blan­ket a build­ing with cov­er­age?

    Just check­ing. Because your sar­casm makes you look pretty dumb there. Cell ser­vice in air­ports should not suck, and usu­ally doesn’t.

  • Chris

    You do real­ize that cell phone tow­ers are just sup­port struc­tures for the anten­nas that do the actual work, right? And that, just like 802.11 anten­nas, cell phone anten­nas do not have to be mounted on a tower in order to blan­ket a build­ing with cov­er­age?

    Just check­ing. Because your sar­casm makes you look pretty dumb there. Cell ser­vice in air­ports should not suck, and it usu­ally doesn’t.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Unlike you I do real­ize that cell phones use licensed fre­quen­cies, unlike 802.11 and oper­ate at sig­nal strengths orders of mag­ni­tude higher than those used for 802.11. I also do real­ize that air­ports cover mil­lions of square feet, most of it adja­cent to equip­ment that also uses RF sig­nal­ing to fuck­ing keep peo­ple alive, and that while “blan­ket­ing” a build­ing with cov­er­age may be won­der­ful from the point of view of sat­is­fy­ing the needs of new media douche bags to inform the world of their every pass­ing thought, doing so involves work­ing with no less than two fed­eral reg­u­la­tory agen­cies, and upwards of three local and state agen­cies. In short you fuck­ing git, I didn’t say it was impos­si­ble I said it was dif­fi­cult.

    Oh, by the by, air­ports that I’ve had shitty ser­vice in, on AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile:
    LAX
    Phoenix Sky Harbor
    Chicago O’Hare
    Dublin International
    Dallas Fort Worth
    …

  • Hamilton-Lovecraft

    I’m not hold­ing out much hope here. There’s a huge chunk of the Mission District in San Francisco, for exam­ple, pretty much tech hip­ster cen­tral, that’s been an AT&T dead zone since the phone launched. I can’t imag­ine that AT&T hasn’t been told about this already through any num­ber of other chan­nels (for instance, an Apple employee of my acquain­tance who I can’t reli­ably text when she’s at home). In at least some cases, it’s not that they don’t know about the prob­lem, it’s that they can’t or won’t fix it.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    And yet cov­er­age in Phoenix has only steadily improved. I guess AT&T just hates San Fransisco. Can’t blame ‘em really.

  • http://twitter.com/rottenchester Rottenchester

    Maybe PHX lets cell providers build new tow­ers or hang anten­nas off of exist­ing struc­tures, and the tech hip­ster Mission District has a bad case of cell-tower NIMBYism.

    Also, if the FCC were a real reg­u­la­tory agency, they’d man­date that every phone have an app like this, and the data col­lected would be pub­licly avail­able on a site that allowed users to com­pare trou­ble reports for all carriers.

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  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    “Maybe PHX lets cell providers build new tow­ers or hang anten­nas off of exist­ing struc­tures, and the tech hip­ster Mission District has a bad case of cell-tower NIMBYism.“

    Yeah, I thought about point­ing that out but was too lazy. It is, in fact, a pain in the ass here in PHX when a car­rier wants to put in a new tower. Complaints a’plenty. I can only imag­ine it’s much worse over in Hipster Town.

  • http://kgelner.myopenid.com/ Kendall

    They can make cell tow­ers look like trees, why not like Starbucks? Then they can put them all over.

    You could even warm the home­less if you made them pow­er­ful enough.

  • bkhar­mony

    You should get Fireballed more often. This is the most enter­tain­ing thing I’ve seen all day.

  • davey_boi

    “Rewritten” poorly. Nice try.

  • http://twitter.com/nafun NaFun

    So basi­cally, stop being a typ­i­cal snarky, do-nothing blog­ger. Got it. Way to give the airbag some link­age. Thing is with shitty blog­gers like these is it pays more to get the link­age from the peo­ple they piss off than it does to do some­thing good for the world.

  • http://twitter.com/nafun NaFun

    So basi­cally, stop being a typ­i­cal snarky, do-nothing blog­ger. Got it. Way to give the airbag some link­age. Thing is with shitty blog­gers like these is it pays more to get the link­age from the peo­ple they piss off than it does to do some­thing good for the world.

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  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/danshockley DanShockley

    TUAW is the brain-size-runt of the Mac-web. I’ve run across anti-Apple arti­cles there that were com­pletely illog­i­cal — it is like CNET has a secret divi­sion pre­tend­ing to be an inde­pen­dent Mac-related web­site. Not sure why they bother.

  • Mars

    Over the sum­mer, AT&T fixed some of those dead zones in the Mission. It’s not all bet­ter, but I’m not such an AT&T hater, now.

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