[31045] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Ameritech Service Quality Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Thu Sep 7 08:44:55 2000
Message-ID: <39B78D60.BF9EDDE6@greendragon.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2000 08:43:37 -0400
From: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
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To: nanog@merit.edu
Cc: Richard Welty <rwelty@vpnet.com>
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Richard Welty wrote:
> on more than one occasion, when managing customer installs or
> troubleshooting,
> we've had Ameritech tell us that they can see the CPE and try and
> declare
> their work done.
>
> of course, we always include an appropriately timed step in our
> procedure
> where the CPE is disconnected and turned off, so we usually put an end
> to
> that right then and there.
>
That's very clever! I'll have to add that to our repertoire.
> it's kind of depressing that you have to presume that a critical vendor
> is going to lie to you.
>
Yep, that's my observation, too.
I've had more problems with Ameritech over my lifetime, but HellSouth
is no pushover in the troubleshooting melee. A recent experience:
A t1 frame between two of our main POPs carries mostly RADIUS traffic
and some email. We'd added it to avoid carrying all the traffic
through the single point of congestive failure of the router(s) to our
upstreams, all located in Jackson MS.
Funny thing, most nights about 6-7 pm local, it would flap, continuing
for 3 or 4 hours. During the flap, none of our dialups could access
RADIUS, and thus we'd get a lot of support calls complaining.
As it was intermittant, it was hard to track down. It's not a saturated
link, OSPF would re-route everything fairly quickly, and the staff got
used to the regular alarms.
This went on for months (ever since installation). They claimed it
was CPE. We replaced every wire, DSU, and Cisco line card.
Finally, we just turned it off, and demanded a refund for 7 months.
Lo and behold, it was escalated, and the problem went away. They have
refused to explain what the problem was, merely telling us that it was
"routine" maintenance.
My moral is, money is the only thing that talks. Cancel contracts,
demand refunds. The salescritters have more power than the
technicians....
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