Amherst, Ohio - Microcell - Flashing 3G Light

"No life other than to monitor this forum..."

Wow, thanks for the humor and your positive attitudes.

I have the same problem. ATT Microcell (white). Was working OK. Suddenly as of middle of last week, it's three green and the last one (3G) is flashing green. No connection. Watching activation on the web page, first three steps are good, then it fails with error "FTC101: MicroCell was unable to connect to the AT&T network …" at the end.

Chat has been helpful; ditto your comments here. Deactivated, reactivated. Power-off then on, about a thousand times. Cycled power on everything in the network chain here. ISP is Fairpoint DSL in NH. They swear they are not interrupting any ports. Unless I can check port 4500 and 500 to your servers, I can only conclude the MicroCell must be broken.

I'm tech savvy and have Unix shell (actually terminal window on Mac OS). Anything else I can try?? traceroute? ping? Port-tester?

Open-port testers you mentioned above -- I could point the tester at http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/ to the microcell server. Would that give a valid response? But, I would need to know a server IP.

How can I rule out the possibility that my ISP is blocking 4500 or 500 somewhere up the chain?

Anything else to try before declaring this one broken and asking for a swap?

My microcell has been online and working fine since October 2012. Got home from work friday night, 8/8/14 to find my 3G light blinking as well.  Have rebooted, de-activated/re-activated, rebooted DSL Modem, removed and re-linked to modem, light still blinking.

Went through online chat yesterday, suggested all things I'd already tried.  Tech did state that it appears my microcell is trying to update and can't.  I have no clue why nor how to fix this. 

Unfortunately for us, this is the only phone service we have at the house now.

Anybody have any idea how to get back on-line with this modem?

Thanks.

 I'm assuming that the Power, ethernet, and GPS lights are solid green an only the 3G light is blinking green? The setup of you MicroCell hasn't changed either since it last worked (setup, window position, etc)?

Try a hard reset. Disable power to the MicroCell. Hold in the reset button on the back with a paperclip and restore power. Keep holding in the reset button for about 30 seconds and then release it. That forces the MicroCell back to defaults and clears out all memory and registers. It may be that something go hung up and the MicroCell is stuck somewhere on a command line.

Other than doing a speed test to various servers and various times of the day, and the VoIP line test, there's not much that you can do on your end to resolve this. You can try the port tester to see if all four ports are open but they are not always the most accurate. Sometimes AT&T on their end can see if traffic is coming to them via the four ports and which one is blocked, if any. However, they can't determine where in the pathway that the ports may be blocked. That is usually what the ISP had to do.

I would send a PM to CustomerCare with you issue, what you have done to correct it, your account information, the best way to contact you, and most importantly, where you are located in case this is a regional thing.

Some ISP's are better at helping their customers than others. But don't expect them to know anything about the MicroCell setup because they won't.

@atwilder- see my comment above to SallyShears.

Everybody listen up to OttoPylot and Avedis53; they have good info.

Resolution of my case:

 - The 3G light is flashing, no phone connection, stays that way for a week. Nothing helps.

 - AT&T has no way of troubleshooting this, at least not via Chat or phone Tech Support. 

 - Since they cannot identify the problem, the only thing left is to swap out the MicroCell.

Today, with no changes on my part, the 3G light is now solid and the phone is connected. This is the same assumed broken MicroCell. Go figure. Must have been a problem in the network or at AT&T, we'll never know. 

So, if your 3G light is flashing, remember my case and the guy in Amherst Ohio: Nothing helped, and without explanation the problem went away a week later.

Good luck everyone. Thanks OttoPylot and Avedis53.

You're welcome. Quite often AT&T will work with a cooperative ISP and get the issues resolved, but we are not told what exactly the problem/resoution was because it's proprietary on the ISP side and AT&T's side.

Update to my post above.  Got home from work last night and lo and behold, 3G light was solid green again.  Only took 4 days to install the "stuck" update.  After googling this issue and reading the forums here, it appears that this last update AT & T sent out to microcells caused a lot of them to lock up.  Just hope future updates don't cause the same issues.

Same timing as for me.

Mine went out sometime between 5pm August 6 and 6pm August 8th. 

Bounced back to life with no change on my end yesterday August 11th.

AT&T update that didn't work?  We'll never know.

My Microcell just quit as well, it has been working for over a year without a hickup. Now the 3G light blinks, all others solid green. ATT is telling me that the error is a blocked port, I checked all of my router ports and my ISP has none blocked that would affect the microcell. In other words, nothing on our end has changed. ATT also is telling me that there are not any complaints like mine regarding microcell. This happened once before and it took weeks to resolve, we live in a rural community outside of Denver and depend greatly on our cell phones, I guess its time to go to Verizon which I l know works well in my area. I have been an ATT customer since the late 80's, sad that ATT cannot at least be truthful with customers.

Chris