Re: Wanted: Clueful Individual @ TeleGlobe.net

["Douglas A. Dever" <dever () hq oh verio net>]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Steve Gibbard wrote:

> When I was working for an ISP that got most of its dial-up lines from
> CLECs, we ran into this sort of problem a lot.  Generally we would end up
> with a situation where no customers off a given CO would be able to call
> one of our phone numbers, instead either getting a fast busy, or such an
> excessive error rate that they couldn't pass data effectively.  Having the
> customer call Ameritech repair (Ameritech was the local ILEC) generally
> resulted in Ameritech telling the customer that their line worked and the
> problem must be somewhere else.  On the other hand, if I called the CLECs'
> switch people, they could generally call the Ameritech call routing
> people, who would find a problem somewhere in Ameritech's trunking and get
> it fixed.

I'd like to point out I've had similar experiences with Ameritech.  When I
was working for a local ISP in the Cleveland area, we used a CLEC
exclusively for our dialup PRIs.  We often had situations where customers
off of a given CO would get dead air, or retrain constantly.  The CLEC
would claim nothing was wrong and point at the LEC... Customer would call
Ameritech repair and be told nothing was wrong or that there was nothing
they could do since the customer was dialing a CLEC NPA-NXX.

This particular CLEC had a 48+ hour outage in 1998 to 4 of their NPA-NXX
after Ameritech left a loopback in a piece of fiber between the two
companies after a maintinence window, closed the ticket, and forgot about
the maint. for a couple of days. 

While I don't often attribute to malice that which can be covered by
general apathy and stupidity... I've often wondered if Ameritech didn't
have a vested interest in not running down such problems.

-Doug