Basic Cell Phone Tips

Hello all,

I thought I would make my first post about the basics on cell phones and some tips on how to fix them, thus saving you a call to customer service. These tips are exclusively for at&t accounts and may or may not apply to other carriers. In future posts I will delve a little deeper and explain network terms such as VLR, HLR, MWI and what they mean to you and your cell phone.

By far the biggest issue I get calls at work are about signal issues (or lack thereof). 90% of the time this issue can be corrected by powering your phone off and then right back on. This will reestablish the network connection in most cases.

Now, that being said, please remember that a cell phone will not work in all areas at all times under all circumstances. Particularly when you are in an area where no coverage is provided (duh) and in such places as basements, trailers, metal buildings, or even in your living room. Cell phones work on a “Line of sight” basis. this means if there is ANYTHING that blocks the signal between you and the tower your phone is pulling from, you will loose service. This could be a wall, a building, a tree, even that new transformer the power company decided to install in the street.

That being said, here are some troubleshooting steps to determine if your phone is the problem or if it is the network.

1. Check with others in your area. If you are the ONLY one having the problem and no one else is, it is probably a phone issue and has nothing to do with the network. On the other hand, if everyone you speak to says “Ya, I have that problem too!”, then give us a call because we need to check into the network. Under certain qualifying circumstances we will replace your phone and SIM card free of charge, you will need to contact us to get more information. We will NOT provide a credit or release you from your contract.

2. If you are in a basement, trailer, wal-mart, whatever, and you have no signal then I’m sorry but that’s the way it is. As long as you get signal outside in an area we provide service to, then we cannot troubleshoot it.

3. Read your manual! I can’t stress this enough. You will be surprised at what you phone can do, but allot of times those things rely on certain settings or require specific key presses which can be found in the manual.

4. Use the online tools at&t offers. We have an awesome “Device Tutorial” that will walk you through all kinds of basic and advanced settings in your phone. Including but not limited to browser settings, text message and picture message settings, and a host of other things.

Some Services you can do without calling customer service follows:

“Star Services”

1. *PAY and press send to pay your bill

2. *MIN# and press send to see your minute useage and minutes remaining. NOTE: If you change anything on your account this may not be available untill your next bill cycle.

3. *BAL# and press send to check your balance

4. *DATA# and press send to see your data usage and what you have left.

This has only touched the service of cell phones and I intend to go much deeper in to how the network works to make your cell phone work for you.

TIP OF THE POST:

When you call an at&t customer and get the voice mail but don’t want to listen to the recording and go straight to the “beep” press 3

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