Network Outage Disrupts Cingular Wireless Service

An outage in San Diego knocked out service for numerous Cingular Wireless customers for nearly four hours Thursday.

Cingular, which is 60% owned by SBC Communications Inc., said a problem with some gear caused intermittent outages that left an undetermined number of customers without voice or data service.

“We will look at what happened and why to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Cingular spokesman Arturo Navarro said.

The problem was traced to gear used to transmit calls and signals for AT&T; Wireless, which Cingular acquired last fall. Merging the two networks has created problems for customers, who have complained to regulators and industry consumer groups about poor service.

However, Navarro said the outage, which hit shortly before 10 a.m. and lasted until 1:45 p.m., had nothing to do with problems in combining the networks.

In the industry, telecommunications companies typically use each others’ networks to complete calls. In San Diego, AT&T; Wireless, now Cingular, sometimes uses fiber optic lines owned by MCI Inc., a person familiar with that operation said.

It was gear at one point on MCI’s San Diego network that failed, the person said.

MCI restored service within three hours, although it probably took longer for its customers to regain service, spokeswoman Carolyn A. Tyler said. She said MCI was probing the matter.

“I couldn’t send any calls. And then there was no signal,” San Diego customer Joe Spinozzi said. “I called customer service, and the woman said the problem was big and growing. Even when service came back, I was getting the ‘all circuits busy’ message for a while. It was a bad day for wireless customers.”