It is most certainly a tower issue that you were having. I had the worst experience ever with Cingular's tech support, at all tiers. My BB's (7290's) would switch from GPRS to GSM around our office location when we first got them. I called and spoke with Cingular bus. reps. and tech support people for over 2 months. I would tell them that a tower had to be down because of the characteristics of my situation and they would check the system and say nothing seems to be wrong. Finally I told them that I would drive around and find the tower that was down. I did. When I called back to tell them where the tower was they said again that nothing was wrong. I finally had a meeting with my bus rep, the I.T. Director, myself (systems analyst), and the Regional Manager for Cingular. I convinced them that it was in their best interest to fix the problems. They finally gave me the number to the engineers that ride around and check for these types of problems. Come to find out, surprise! the tower in question was indeed down. You see, the tech guys would check the tower and it would report that service was fine. This was true, FOR GSM/VOICE! NOT FOR DATA! I have had 17 BB's running on a BES since that day and have not had problems until today when I noticed my new BB (8700) was switching back and forth from EDGE to GSM which had me concerned that I was not switching to GPRS. My BES was showing that the 7290 users were getting emails in this area so they had to have been on GPRS. Why was mine not switching to GPRS too? I don't know and I don't care enough to ever speak to another person at Cingular. Lucky for me my BB switched back to EDGE sometime this morning and I am going to pretend that whatever the problem was it will never return; I feel fairly certain it is a network/tower issue. Many times these on again/off again situations are from Cingular having network load balancing issues and are usually worked out fairly quickly. This is the same situation as happened in this area after Katrina hit the Gulf (We are located in Alabama). Regardless, it is best to report the problem and then hope that more of you are complaining so that it will be recognized as a problem and fixed. I have discovered that it is not that Cingular doesn't have a good network, it is that the line of people they have answering phones could care less if the network is running and most of them are clueless about it all anyway. I think Cingular has been aware of this problem and that is one of the reasons for merging with AT&T Wireless; They need their customer support. At any rate, Cingular does have the best coverage and I will be sticking with them for a long time; I think, maybe, possibly.
