Our voicemail has been unavailable since late Sunday. Area code 501.

Anyone else on AT&T having an issue with Voicemail?

Mine was acting up last week.
Can dial in now, but still have a notification that I have unread VMs with an empty VM box.

Area code 281.

I have been having problems going back at least 1 year with one of our AT&T lines forwarding to another. When called by another AT&T customer instead of going to voicemail, they would get a recording that the number couldn't be completed as dialed, wasn't in service, or similar.

Dealt with them over 20 times. Customer support to advance customer support to technical support to advance technical support to a work ticket issued to whomever is above them (but can't talk to them on the phone). Never could fix the problem.

Thousands of employees, many of them with degrees in these technical things, and they can't seem to figure out things like voicemail or call forwarding.

quote:

Originally posted by a1abdj:

I have been having problems going back at least 1 year with one of our AT&T lines . . . Thousands of employees, many of them with degrees in these technical things, and they can't seem to figure out things like voicemail or call forwarding.

I might be able to shed a little light on that.

I spent much of my working life as a system developer in the telephone industry: Bell Labs, AT&T, BellSouth, and some of the competitors.

My last work with them was the late 1990s, I was doing software development work on contract with one of the Bell System companies. Each team had a couple of senior company type folks in various roles of team leadership, and a bunch of contract people like me doing the grunt work.

That worked out really well, and we were able to turn out quality design work.

Then, along came one of the big consulting companies, with a super job of salesmanship but nothing to back it up, convinced the Bell System company that the big consulting company should take over all software development.

Once in the door, the big consulting company started filling the contract seats with H1B people from overseas. Cheaper labor, don't you know, higher profits. They promised to get these "engineers" green cards, teach them to speak English, pay them a tiny fraction of what they would have had to pay us (the American guys who had years of experience with the complex telephone systems and actually understood what we were doing).

Results were shitty product, software that "broke" all the time, and a great big profit for the big consulting company that did not deliver what their sales people promised.

Does that clear up anything for you?

quote:

Does that clear up anything for you?

I got that distinct impression as 80% of those phone calls involved people with foreign accents.

We may have solved the problem though. Guy at the AT&T store suggested a phone that handles 2 lines, which would eliminate the forwarding.

There may be a limit on how many calls can forward at one time.

Now that you mention it, last few days voicemail has been dodgy. Unusual delays.

Yeah, my work cell's voicemail service was down for about 5 days at the end of last week and over the weekend. Finally started working again on Monday afternoon.

Quite annoying.

My voicemail was completely inaccessible for several days. I had a VM indicator on my phone and every time I tried to dial VM to access it and entered my password, it would just have a long pause and say "system not available, goodbye", and hang up. Turns out after searching around a bit I found a thread with LOTS of similar complaints and no resolution or ETA from AT&T other than it was a server problem with their systems. Finally earlier today I tried again and was able to retrieve my VM but now the VM indicator still shows on my phone even after listening and deleting the VMs. Tried resetting my phone but same thing occurs and VM indicator won't go away. I am so done with AT&T...my family plan contract only lasts a few months more and I'm so looking forward to moving our services to Verizon or someone else. I am DONE with AT&T and any/all of their services. Their customer service sucks (as does their website and online account management), they purposely stonewall you when you bring billing "errors" and suddenly missing plan discounts to their attention, and are overall one of the most underhanded, self-serving, conniving, customer service experiences of any company I've ever dealt with. The end of our contract / phone financing can't come soon enough. I may even look into some early exit options.

quote:

Originally posted by Dtech:

I am so done with AT&T...my family plan contract only lasts a few months more and I'm so looking forward to moving our services to Verizon

IF you have internet service from Spectrum, and IF you do not use a large amount of cellular data (wifi data is free), take a look at Spectrum's mobile service.

They are a Verizon MVNO, so service rides on the Verizon network.

My wife and I are using this service. Fourteen bucks / month for each phone ($28.00 total), INCLUDING all taxes and junk fees, gets us unlimited calls, unlimited texts, and 2 GB shared data. Additional data for the shared pool is $14 / GB. Or, unlimited data makes it $45.00 / month for each phone, again that INCLUDES all taxes and junk fees. Wifi data on Spectrum hot spots is free, and there seem to be a lot of these hot spots.

You can get this service if your home (or business) internet is not supplied by Spectrum, but in that case thee is an additional $20 per phone.

Also, my few interactions with their customer service have been the second best of all the cell phone providers I have dealt with in 25 years or so. The best customer service interactions have been with Ting, also an economical re-seller, but not for Verizon -- Ting sells service on the Sprint network for CDMA users, and T-Mobile for GSM phones.