Unadilla, New York Residents Crying Foul Over Cell Service

AT&T wireless customers in Unadilla are not happy with their service, or lack there of in town. Residents are reporting a strange issue that they say has been occurring for over a year now.

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Multiple customers have reported that their AT&T cell service is not working within the village, and that their phone displays SOS capabilities only. When leaving the village the service returns as normal, miraculously and inexplicably. I queried the local Unadilla Facebook group, and here are some of the responses.

Jessica S said: "Yesterday I was driving from Sidney, I had no problem with service in Sidney. Then, once I hit Unadilla I was on SOS mode. I was there about an hour and the service would say I had service for a minute but couldn’t do anything like texts or make a phone call. As soon as I left town I had service again."

Darryl L commented that there is a constant outage in the Unadilla area, and once you exit the village it works again perfectly. I asked Darryl if this was due to the recent storm, and he replied that the issue had occurred for over a year at this point.

The responses from AT&T have been less than helpful according to village residents. "AT&T doesn’t offer much information except - there are multiple severely degraded towers down. Unknown estimated time for restoration. But this issue is common for the Unadilla area, it’s happened more frequently over the last 6 months" said Christine H.

I called AT&T and emailed their corporate media relations department. At the time of publication, I have not received a response. When I spoke with someone in their technical support sector, they told me from what they could see, everything should be working as normal in Unadilla, they saw no outages. A coverage map from the AT&T website is below. It does not show any "dead spots".

Another village resident weighed in with some eye opening information: "It is definitely impacting the emergency services of our community, a lot of our fire and EMS are AT&T customers, We have had multiple fire and EMS calls in the last few days, With the cell phone service being affected we are relying on our pagers and the siren located in our village to respond to calls, it is a huge issue that needs answers, AT&T keeps giving a timeline that comes and goes with no repairs!!"

The general consensus in Unadilla is that people want action, not a credit to their bill while feeling brushed off by the company. We'll keep you updated on this developing story.