Workaround For AT&T’s Worthless 3G Microcell App

I live in a very small town and finally reached the end of my patience with AT&T’s DSL service and made the switch to Comcast. As a matter if fact, I switched just about everything. To Comcast including TV, Phone (landline) as well as their Comcast Home security system. The only thing left in my house from the “Death Star” was my mobile service and a 3G Microcell. Like I mentioned earlier, I live in a very small town and have almost no bars of service within my home. With the 3G Microcell however, I got 4-5 bars 85-90 percent of the time. Like all things AT&T it was prone to stop working from time to time. The only thing I was concerned about with the swap to com at was if the 3G Microcell would work on my super fast Comcast Internet. I had done some searches and saw that it would or at least some other people had had some success using it on Comcast Internet.

As luck would have it, I would not be here when the Comcast guy came to install everything. Luckily my computer savvy wife would be home and I would have nothing to worry about. Yeah. I’m totally lying here. She has no idea about anything electronic. 367 phone calls later to the conference I was attending and I thought everything was worked out. I thought wrong. The damn microcell doesn’t work and no one has cell phone service. Ugh!!!
More searching on the internet. Turns out the Comcast dude hooked my 3G Microcell into the back of this funky new device:

It has tons of blinking lights and buttons and I knew right away it was going to be a problem. Low and behold I was right and the 3G Microcell needs to be plugged directly into the back of the modem. No problem. Swapped it out and power cycled everything. Hurray! My phone picks up the Microcell again and I got 5 bars of service! This rocks! Problem the wife says. What now? No one else can connect to the Microcell. Crap. Okay, easy enough, power cycle every device in the house. Nope. Not going to work. So I whip out my iPad and log into the AT&T 3G Microcell App. I remove everyone’s phone number and then add them back in and power cycle all the devices again. Nope. Not happening. Search the internet. Nothing. Crap. Now I got to call AT&T customer support.

I actually got through in just a few minutes and was talking to a real person who seemed quite knowledgeable. I lay out my problems for her and she says no problem. I am highly doubtful of the ease that she seems to think this problem will be resolved but hey, giver her a shot. So I recount my whole situation and device/service changes and she says simple. Text “add” hit space and then type in the 10 digit cell phone number you want to add to 6235. I did and then power cycled that device and it worked! I did the same thing to the other numbers and they are all added back and “un-whitelisted” as she called it. I asked her why the AT&T app didn’t work and she would not answer other than to say that the best way to handle any changes was to text them to 6235 with the word add and then a space following with the 10 digit phone number. To remove a phone number you just change add to “remove” or “delete”. I asked again about the app and she said it was best not to use it and that texting was the best alternative at this time.

I gotta say that customer support was really quite good but thanks AT&T for wasting my time with a worthless app! The app has since been deleted. 5 bars of service rocks!