T-Mobile Nexus One owners early yesterday morning complained of a widespread data outage, with an unknown number of subscribers affected.
The problem reportedly began at 4:30 a.m. PST, with confused subscribers posting complaints and questions on the Nexus One and T-Mobile support forums.
The issue reportedly affected subscribers in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Phoenix. Rural subscribers also suffered outages, but it's impossible to determine how many people away from metropolitan areas also lost service.
"We're aware of reports with T-Mobile data connections, including the error: 'To connect to the Internet with the device you are using, you'll need a webConnect data plan.' We're currently working with T-Mobile to resolve this issue," a Google employee wrote in an online forum post.
Google posted the following message on its forums at 11 a.m. PST: "The problem experienced by some users with T-Mobile data connections has been resolved. If you are still having trouble establishing a connection please power down your Nexus One, then turn it back on."
Some users complained of lingering problems throughout the afternoon, but the problem does appear to have been resolved.
Last October, T-Mobile Sidekick owners suffered a network outage that led to some owners losing pictures, contacts and other data from their phones. The problem was linked to Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which apparently suffered a server outage.
As a growing number of mobile phone subscribers head towards unlimited text and data plans, these types of outages can severely cut into T-Mobile's business. The company has already had a difficult time dealing with increased competition from AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and must now deal with high profile network issues.
If T-mobile wants to start gaining subscribers instead of losing them, they need to vastly improve their 3G data network and take steps to prevent these outages from occurring.
