[Outages-discussion] Question about cellular outages

[jrk1231-outml at nym.hush.com]

All,
Okay... this is probably not the best place to post this question, and
it may be entirely inappropriate here... but I'm not sure where else
to ask.
I have AT&T for cellular (crapy, expensive service... but that's
another issue) and I've had zero or one bar of signal on my phone at
my house for weeks, if I have any signal at all. AT&T admits they
"have an issue and we're working on it, need parts, and have no ETR."
In the course of my "discussions" with AT&T regarding this issue, I
have been told that they have problems in my area with 3 towers, where
Apple devices can't make or receive calls, but data works okay. They
said that one of those towers also has outages with Pantech and two of
them have HTC outages, and a 4th tower has issues with Pantech and
Motorola. 
So, this is my question: I thought all GSM cell phones used the same
basic set of frequencies, etc. within a given 2G/3G/4G/LTE framework.
However, it appears from my conversations with AT&T, they have to have
device-vendor specific equipment on each tower for each vendor's
handsets. That seems insane. Can someone clue me in here what is going
on regarding why certain towers would have problems with certain
vendor's handsets? Something just doesn't make sense or appears to be
needlessly complex.
I also gather that piled on top of the vendor-specific equipment
issues are the issue of 2G vs. 3G vs. 4G/LTE equipment. If the
cellular systems are as complex as AT&T is making this sound (and I've
heard the same story from multiple AT&T tech support folks), it
appears to be a miracle that anything ever works.

Can someone please clue me in what is going on here?

THANKS!
Jon Kibler
--
Jon R. Kibler
+001-843-813-2924

People who are willing to sacrifice liberty for temporary security
deserve neither liberty nor security
  -- Ben Franklin
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