Re: Ameritech Service Quality Report

[William Allen Simpson <wsimpson () greendragon com>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

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....

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 6.5.1

iQCVAwUBObeNGtm/qMj6R+sxAQEqbAP/QLWhxAoa6DZ2Wl266wEgHTnbhrH11qU/
dxQKmb4wvw5mVmu0+HFX2Ysjwde9P3Y2qD1wm4Dp0aIBOUBbKbVPGNONQztPpyjY
4z9aear8l2KHUe4JWkeflphKUuCn7pQ7c0cYPDGBFkztGmWemBXNuYDRsfGfDN/c
ZLlmFe0vHLo=
=EJ2H
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----