The AT&T 3G Microcell SUCKS!

Thanks for stopping by. I have a tale of woe that I'm happy to pass along to anyone thinking of purchasing the AT&T 3G Microcell. Ironically, I still believe and hope that the Microcell will function properly some day. But as currently implemented, it is my opinion that every microcell AT&T sells today is an act of fraud.

Update! As of November of 2011, our family are no longer customers of AT&T. We're getting service now from Verizon. Their EVDO network, at its fastest, is not as fast as AT&T. But there are so many places I frequent where AT&T's network just doesn't work at all that it doesn't really much matter how slow EVDO is. Verizon's LTE network, of course, is many times faster than even the very best HSPA service I've ever had from AT&T. More to the point for this site, the Verizon Microcell (called the Network Extender) works perfectly, in marked contrat to AT&T's. Unfortunately, they don't offer an unlimited calling deal like AT&T does, but that's really the only downside.

Update! And what's AT&T's response to the abject failure that the Microcell represents? According to Engadget, they're going to raise the price of the Microcell by $50.

Unbelievable chutzpah.

First, if you have a microcell that isn't working, skip down below to see what you can do.

Let me just interject here at this point that you don't need to believe me alone. You can visit AT&T's own customer forums and read about all of the problems AT&T's customers have had with the microcell. Go ahead and go now. I'll be here when you get done.

Our list of Microcell problems:

1. On a fairly large percentage of calls (my wife's experience is about 1 out of 3), there will be periods of time when the caller's audio gets "choppy". There seems to be a distance sensitivity - the further you are away from the microcell, the worse it is. My wife routinely walks into the room where the microcell is located to get relief. Despite this, we have a minimum of 3 bars of Microcell signal anywhere in our small house, so it's not a strength issue, per se. There are lots of videos on YouTube people have made about this problem. Here's one of the best.
2. Sometimes (this happens a couple times a day at least), there will be episodes where attempting to place a call results in immediate "Call failed." This will happen several times in a row before the call goes through. while our experience is not as extreme as this, there is an excellent video on YouTube that illustrates this problem as well.
3. Often the phones will not discover the Microcell when we arrive home without being bounced briefly into "Airplane mode" or power cycled or some such. This is despite the fact that the macro network in our house is at most 2 bars and the Microcell is at least 3.
4. The microcell has about 100 msec of extra latency in the voice. This may not seem like much, but it is enough of a delay to seem like a bad international call. You find yourself constantly tripping over the other party as you both start sentences at the same time.
5. The upload data channel is capped at 50-60 kbps - sort of like bad EDGE service. This isn't that big a deal for data, since we have WiFi, but it does mean that sending MMS takes an inordinate amount of time, if it works at all.

We have experienced these problems since we brought the device home in April. 6 months. We've had several trouble tickets open with AT&T about the problem, and they've all been closed with no resolution. AT&T has tried to blame our network for this. Our network is damn near a best case scenario for the microcell. The microcell has a public IP address. Ping it if you like: It's mcell.kfu.com. There's no firewall in front of it at all. No NAT. Nothing in the way. The first-hop latency of our connection is 7 msec with no load. The router is set up to give upload priority to the microcell and our Vonage box in preference to everything else on our network. In short, our network is not the issue here.

The latest trouble ticket AT&T simply closed and told us that the microcell was provisioned correctly and operating within limits. It would either work for us or it wouldn't and there was nothing they could do. That's a pretty far cry from the assurances of their marketing literature.

Speaking of marketing, it's particularly interesting that the marketing website for a product that is targeted towards iPhone users is a page with a giant Flash content pane... that is completely useless on iOS devices.

And that's not all. We've also had periods in the past where the "3g" light on the microcell would simply blink for hours, or even days, and the device would just be down. Others on the AT&T forum have reported outages like this at least weekly. AT&T never promised "5 9s" of reliability or anything, but there is no server status "dashboard" anywhere where they could communicate known outages to their customers. It's 2010. Damn near every other Internet-based service provider does this by now. Except AT&T.

AT&T has not acknowledged these problems in any way. By contrast, when the "death touch" issue came up about the iPhone 4, Apple responded with a press conference within 20 days of the product's launch. There, they explained the problem, it's scope, and Apple's plan to remediate the issue. Regardless of whether or not you agreed with them, at least they said something. 6 months in and AT&T hasn't even got a straight story for their own support staff, so far as I can tell.

And there's more. The microcell has a GPS receiver in it. They use this to verify that the microcell is located at the address you've registered with AT&T's microcell management website. So far, I don't have a problem with that at all. It's necessary for them to verify that the Microcell is located where they're licensed to provide service. The problem is that AT&T has to have a database that translates people's addresses into GPS coordinates. In many cases, those databases are erroneous. That's to be expected. What is unaceptable is that AT&T doesn't seem to understand that this is a frequently encountered issue and have some sort of reasonable process in place to accomodate it. While I have not personally encountered this issue, the forum is alive with stories of people who have gotten error code 103 (which, so far as I can determine is the error indicating a mismatch between the GPS coordinates reported by the microcell and those expected) and been told any number of fairy tales by AT&T support.

All that said, I still hope that AT&T can fix the microcell. I'll say it publicly here: If AT&T fixes my microcell, I'll give this domain to them. But AT&T needs to do a better job communicating, both internally and with their customers. There's just no excuse for the level of secrecy, disinformation and incompetence that has made it necessary for this message to be created.

If you, like me, own a 3G Microcell, and it isn't working properly, here are my suggestions as to what you can do about it:

• Take it back to the store where you bought it, tell them that it doesn't work and demand your money back. Do so loudly. Maybe someone else in the store is there to buy one and you can disuade them from doing so. Unfortunately, this only works if you bought it less than 30 days ago.
• Join the chorus of unhappy customers at the AT&T customer forum for the Microcell.
• Comment on YouTube videos extoling the virtues of the Microcell. The two I recommend are here and here.
• Send me an e-mail with your story. I'll include as much information as I can here to try and keep everyone updated about the Microcell.

For what it's worth, the troubleshooting tips I have are as follows:

• If the power light (the one that looks like an O with an I inside) is anything other than solid green, then your Microcell is broken.
• If the Internet light (the one that looks like Saturn) is blinking, it means that your Microcell isn't connected to the Internet. Check the connections and your internet connection from a computer. In general, so far as I can tell, firewall issues with blocked connections are NOT reflected by this light, but rather with the 3G light blinking (read on).
• If the GPS light (the one that looks like a satellite) blinks for longer than 10 minutes, it likely means that your Microcell cannot get a GPS fix. You'll have to either buy an external GPS antenna for it (these are unsupported, but they work), or move it somewhere where it can see the sky better. The standard advice is to put it near a window, but if you do, watch out for high efficiency windows that have metal in the glass. Those can sometimes block GPS signals.
• If the 3G light (the one that looks like the "5 bars" signal strength indicator) is the only thing blinking, then that means that the Microcell is unable to obtain or maintain a connection to AT&T's network. There's any number of possible reasons why this might be, and absolutely no information available anywhere as to what might be happening. In many cases, this is caused by a server outage - Microcells in entire regions will be down and blinking, sometimes for days. In other cases, it could be firewall problems with your Internet router. Sometimes if your Internet connection goes down briefly (particularly with PPPoE) and comes back up with a new IP address, the Microcell will need to re-establish connectivity. While it does so, the 3G light will blink and the microcell will be unavailable.

In closing, AT&T, you should be ashamed at how hard you make it for your customers to stay loyal. I've been a customer since the company was called Cingular. I'm not feeling the love.

I'm Nick Sayer, and I approved this message.