AT&T encourages customers to buy the 3g MicroCell, a tiny cell phone tower for their homes, when their phone reception is poor, and will often send one for free to customers with chronic crappy reception complaints. But reader Darrell learned that while AT&T is happy to sell the device to customers in Manhattan, they can’t actually activate it right now so it’s useful. Update: AT&T contacted us to let us know that there is no Manhattan outage, thus proving the importance of calling back and getting a different call center rep when you hear something like this.

did you know that if you buy a 3G MicroCell right now and live in midtown manhattan AT&T can’t activate it?

i sure didn’t, and now they are telling me there is nothing they can do. apparently there was a glitch in the system and it was a “known issue” however they aren’t fixing it and are telling customers different stories with each call in. (even going so far as to say it may be your ISP, not their system, even when the errors are coming from their system)

crazy how they can take your money for something that is supposed to offload their bandwidth onto your own internet and then tell you you’re out of luck.

Update: AT&T reached out to us and wants Darrell (and Consumerist readers) to know that there is no outage.

It’s very possible that this reader did experience an activation issue on Friday (the issue continued intermittently over the weekend). But as I said above, it was resolved by Monday. (It was related to a switch to a new platform that will offer a better activation experience.)

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