Private Reviews

I am pretty sure most of iPhone owners have been struggling with AT&T service. Frankly I’m personally fed up with them. We have two iPhones 3G in the family and soon after Apple started selling iPhone 3GS we noticed huge problems with AT&T service.
First symptoms were when we were like in area with high signal strength, but friends and colleagues could not reach us. Our iPhones simply do not ring.

Another one is when we could not place a call or calls drop. Actually at those periods all 3G data communications do not work. Neither you can browse the Internet nor read e-mail, nothing works until phone is either restarted or network reset by putting in airplane mode and back.

So after struggling for a while I have opened a ticket with AT&T secondary tier support engineer and after few days they got back to me telling that it is known problem and that AT&T is working on fixing it and that they’d be updating cellular stations software some time in October.

In meanwhile they recommended to turn off all push notifications on my iPhones. Well I did not have those enabled anyway. They said that it is known that if any data comes in to iPhone while in the middle of phone call it could cause the dropped calls. That last statement got me wondering whether the fix that they are going to apply in October is really just for that or whether it would fix all other issues as well.

Also AT&T rep suggested that sometimes just replacing SIM card helps with the issue. Well I have two iPhones purchased in totally different places and at totally different times and they both have issues and also friends with 3GS iPhones having same problems. All of that suggests that it is not a problem with my particular SIM. I am so frustrated with them that if they will not fix an issue very soon I am switching to another provider.

It looks like AT&T is having big problem with their network being overloaded. I have heard from another friend that his company completely stopped using AT&T laptop wireless access adapters and switched to Verizon since AT&T ones became useless lately.

I suggest to everybody who have any problem with AT&T service contact AT&T customer support right now and demand urgent resolution. We pay too much money to let it slide!!!

[thanks to Niels van Eck for a picture]

It is not very often we can really recommend good car mechanic. But today I would like to do just that. I have almost always been taking my cars to Curry’s Auto Service in their Dulles, VA location until they decided to close that branch.
I have been looking for competent alternative in the area and I think I found one.

The place is called Road Race Technologies. I took one of my cars there for alignment and I am happy with the result so far. And it was just $110 which is also cheaper than I paid before to do the same in both Curry’s or BMW of Sterling. The guy on the phone told me that they usually take BMW’s to next door shop for alignment, but I did not mind since the price was right anyway. When I came to pick up my car that evening I saw that all they were working was BMW cars. Their regular hour cost is $95. Which I think is reasonable now.
Check them out if you are in the Dulles, VA area. I’d like to see more review of them. So far I have only found one on Yelp.

BTW, the way they specified their address on their web site does not work in Google map. So here is correct one with the like for you convenience.
23700 Overland Dr, Sterling, VA 20166

And one thing that I did not especially like is that they open at 8:30 am which is kind of late if you let’s say want to drop your car there in there morning and still get to work on time to some place like in DC.