Re: Software For Telcos

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:04:14 PST, jacob miller said:

> The tracking of Customer circuits to ensure that from marketing, sales,
> accounts and technical department everything to do with the circuits has to be
> tracked.

Reading the NANOG archives will find enough examples of top telcos that *never*
managed to correctly bill for a T-1 that it's safe to assume that quite often,
such tracking does not, in fact, actually happen.

> Anyone with any help in regards to top software that can be used to run such
> a telco to ensure that world class service is obtained will be crucial.

World class service?  Usually provided by the non-top telcos, and used as a
marketing feature.  World class service doesn't come from software, it comes
from corporate culture.

Software doesn't make you hold your customers hostage in a peering dispute,
management decisions do that.  And most customers don't think being held
hostage is world class service - and only top telcos have enough customers
to make a peering displute feasible. (Long-time readers can probably think
of enough examples to run out of examples to count on the fingers of
one hand, even in base 3 ;)

And at one time, there were plenty of small companies that made their living
based on providing world-class service.  You wanted some special one-off setup?
No problem, their CFO and CTO would drive over and discuss pricing and terms -
which usually included "and if it crashes at 2AM, call me on my cell".  You
wanted to discuss a config change on 10 minutes notice at 11PM on a Friday, no
problem.

(What ever happened to those companies, anyhow?)

Hypothesis: The actual quality of service delivered is inversely proportional
to the ability of the provider to deploy off-the-shelf enterprise-class software.
If you can afford it, but your service is still generic enough to use COTS software,
you're not delivering world-class service.

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