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Day-light savings time screws with some Alltel customers. Did you get shafted?

Categories: Alltel, Announcements,
By: , IntoMobile
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 2:55 PM

Alltel glitch causes daylight savings time goofDay-light savings time. It’s the quirky American tradition to squeeze out as much productivity out of the general working populace by rolling back (or forward) the clock to keep daylight in time with business hours. And, with more and more people relying on their mobile phone for telling time, bugs and glitches have the potential to royally screw up a workday.

That’s exactly what happened to some Alltel customers over the time-changing weekend. Apparently, there were some Alltel phones in Little Rock; Panama City and Tallahassee, Fla.; Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.; and Richmond, Va. that turned the clock ahead by an hour rather than turning it back. The Alltel network bug caused cellphones on the No. 5 US carrier’s EVDO network to freak out and shaft customers of an hour of their life.

Some sort of error in the way the network sends updates to phones was evidently screwed up. Fortunately, the bug was detected and fixed in short order, so the damage was kept to a minimum.

So, did any of you Alltel subscribers get the shaft?

[Via: Yahoo]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • weisen

    Can you elaborate on these reports of the network “freaking out” or does “freaking out” simply mean “transmitting the incorrect time?”

    I’m just curious, but also hoping that our new bloggers-as-citizen journalists can avoid the hype (read: lying in order to sell more) that has marginalized some fraction of legitimate journalism, at least here in the US.

  • Will Park

    Sorry, I guess it wasn’t clear when I stated that “there were some Alltel phones in Little Rock; Panama City and Tallahassee, Fla.; Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.; and Richmond, Va. that turned the clock ahead by an hour rather than turning it back.

  • Scott

    That’s pretty funny :P Same thing happened to me with an article I wrote lol!
    To be fair it’s an innocent mistake it’s simply a matter of reading things twice before talking once.

  • Will Park

    Haha, I like that – “reading things twice before talking once.”
    That’s great :smile:

  • weisen

    Hi Will,

    I think you misread my post. I was commenting on your use of the words “freak out” to describe phones simply displaying the wrong time. That seems a bit overboard and, quite frankly, untrue.

  • Meatloaf

    ” And, with more and more people relying on their mobile phone for telling time, bugs and glitches have the potential to royally screw up a workday.

    That’s exactly what happened to some Alltel customers over the time-changing weekend”

    *********

    Ummm…screw up a workday – happened to Alltel customers this weekend/ See a contridaction here? I dont think 2am Sunday morning is a “workday” by most people standards. Maybe YOU’RE screwed up, but most peoples’ work days” were just fine by the time this was fixed bozo.