AT&T data network fails for BlackBerry, iPhone users

by Nancy Gohring

January 31, 2008 —

AT&T's
wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. were down for several
hours on Thursday, 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. Eastern Time, said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman. Voice calling
was not affected, but people trying to use wireless data services may have had
difficulty, he said.

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

Several people reported
in a BlackBerry newsgroup being unable to receive data to their handsets earlier
in the day. A systems administrator in Kansas reported that BlackBerry devices
there were displaying a message that said "data connection refused."

The iPhone runs on the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any
other mobile device that receives data over the EDGE or UMTS networks, may have
had problems using data services during the outage.

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. However, RIM said its infrastructure was operating normally on Thursday,
meaning only the users on AT&T 's network were affected.

IDG News Service