Is the MicroCell Service Down?

First of all, I do not work for AT&T in any capacity whatsoever. I've just had a MicroCell for a very long time and, like you, had some connectivity issues at first that were very frustrating. I worked thru them, with practically no help from AT&T support, and from help with some of the folks here. I've been trying ever since to repay the kindness and support that I received here by helping out wherever I can. That resulted in AT&T awarding me the ACE for contributions made and some solutions to common problems.

It is true that support will initially blame the ISP for connection issues but sometimes they are correct. I firmly believe that while the MicroCell is a great idea, and it does work for most people, it is a poorly implemented device with poor support.

The "4G upgrade" or whatever it was did in fact break a lot of MicroCells. Whether it actually broke something physically in the MicroCell or altered the way it communicates with some ISPs remains unknown. And I doubt if AT&T will ever truly know what it going on let alone tell us.

I recommend port forwarding to a static MicroCell IP address because that is the only way I could get mine to work realiably thru power outages, updates, power cycleing, etc. My connection is a sustained 20Mbps DSL line (1.0Mbps upload) with a static IP address. The router is an Apple Extreme Base Station and the only ethernet connected device is the MicroCell. All three devices, router, DSL gateway, and MicroCell are connected to an APC Battery Backup (model #BE550G). The MicroCell sits about 18" away from an unobstructed window and about 2' feet away from the router.

You can go to the blue envelope in the upper right hand portion of this page, click on it to get to the personal message page, click on New Messages, and send  your issues (including your setup detailed) to ATTCustomerSupport. That is something relatively new here and is supposed to go straight to support with a little more "personal" attention. I haven't used it yet so I can't tell you how effective it is. But it is another avenue to pursue.

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@Otto Pylot wrote:

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@CharlieSchorner wrote:

I have an ADSL connection that's supposed to be up to 768kb, but rarely exceeds 500kb, and the QoS is poor, typically around 30%. However, the MicroCell has worked very well for over a year now, as long as there's not a lot of upstream traffic. When I monitor the data flow during a call, the MicroCell uses very little bandwidth. It's fine for one phone, but I doubt that more than one call could be placed at a time.

 

The GPS signal is good and we seem to be in the database, so I don't see that as a problem. I have not replaced the power supply. My ISP tells me that they've detected a sudden, significant drop in data volume going to 12.230.0.0/16 from all across the state, which may be another indicator of a firmware update gone wrong.

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You need to have at least a  1.5 MB upload speed (sustained) and my guess is that with the upgrade by AT&T for 4G you just don't have enough upload to handle it.

 

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I'd like to correct that. I meant 1.5Mbps download speed. Sorry.

This is very intersting and I'm glad you figured out as much as you did. Sounds to me like whatever update AT&T did screwed the port 4500 and it's ability to communicate properly either at the MicroCell end or AT&Ts server end. This must be regional because I haven't seen that here and we are a major market. You can send a pm (blue envelope in the upper right hand corner) to ATTCustomerSupport which circumvents a level or two.

Since I've already got an escalated contact working on this, I'm going to be following up with him rather than trying to make more noise from another angle. Possibilites that were raised during my previous conversation were routing issues with that netblock, server/software issues, or a device firmware update gone wrong.

I tried checking in w/ them last night and they didn't have an update yet. This morning I'm still not seeing more traffic to/from that netblock.

So... we're all still waiting for them to fix their stuff. Hopefully they'll be able to diagnose it and come up with a solution before the end of the week.

Thanks Megan! I'm eager to see their response! 

That's great! Sounds like something was blocking port 4500 from either AT&Ts or the ISPs end.

I'm not surprised it was on AT&Ts end. That usually seems to be the case. At least your customer's are up and running and all is apparently well.