The out­age started around 2PM PST and affected Internet con­nec­tiv­ity. iPhones all over San Francisco spewed out a mes­sage stat­ing: “Could not acti­vate cel­lu­lar data net­work.” And to think you’re pay­ing $30/mo for 5GB of data. Not sur­pris­ingly visual voice­mail was down too.

Fletcher Cook, AT&T spokesperson:

We are see­ing a hard­ware issue in down­town San Francisco that is caus­ing some degra­da­tion in ser­vice. GSM and Edge voice and data ser­vices are still acces­si­ble. Our experts are aware and work­ing to resolve it as quickly as pos­si­ble. Our pri­or­ity is to resolve it as quickly as pos­si­ble, and then we will focus on what happened.

I know it is easy to harp on AT&T with its ter­ri­bly unre­li­able and tiny 3G net­work so I’m going to do it: have you guys thought about build­ing some redun­dancy into your 3G data net­works?!? How it works is that if one set of equip­ments fail another set kicks in pro­vid­ing a ter­rific expe­ri­ence to users. Got it?

Just two days ago, Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of Mobility and Consumer Markets at AT&T, shared his frus­tra­tions regard­ing heavy users of the company’s data net­works: 3% of AT&T smart­phone users gen­er­ate 40% of wire­less data traf­fic on the network.

We’re going to focus on giv­ing incen­tives to that small per­cent­age of users to reduce or mod­ify their usage.

Idiot. Tell the guys and gals who are the biggest iPhone (I’m guess­ing the smart­phone here is the iPhone) fans to stop using their smart­phone so much. What a bril­liant idea. Might as well tell them to go to Verizon instead. As reported in many places, he also promised that AT&T is work­ing hard to improve ser­vice in San Francisco and Manhattan. And? And we get an out­age. Perfect.

You absolutely need to read, “A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T” by the fake Steve Jobs. Let me share with you a quote that just makes sense:

I mean if you did under­stand how to do things, your guys wouldn’t be stand­ing up at Wall Street con­fer­ences and com­plain­ing about how much traf­fic you’re get­ting. Instead, you would be run­ning around like a f*cking maniac try­ing to build out your f*cking net­work and make it the best net­work in the world — and the only rea­son you would ever need to talk to me would be to thank me for cre­at­ing a phone that’s so amaz­ing that it draws peo­ple to your sh*t net­work in the first place.

Yup, my thoughts exactly, but milder in word choice.

Source: Wired, Telecoms, Engadget, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs