DON'T BELIEVE THEM!!!! NYNEX was refusing to take the steps we demanded
(i.e. switching the line to another pair), asking us to first try another PM2
on the line. Oh, sure. I'll just grab this spare PM2i I happen to have here,
doing nothing.... not. We switched ports on the 5-BRI with no change, and
that wasn't good enough for them.
The other problem we had was that a tech would come out, unplug the BRI and
plug in his tester, and the line always came up. Well, sure. It's the
functional equivalent of rebooting the PM. It forced some sort of
re-connection which would always work... for a while. Since the line might
stay up 5 minutes or 5 hours before failing again, we could never get it to
fail in the 15 second that the tech would spend here. "Well, it's OK now."
"But you'll have to wait!" "I don't have all day. It came up fine, and
that's good enough for me." "Grumble... Just don't close the ticket." But
they would anyway, forcing us to call again within hours and start a new
ticket. They'd test the line remotely, and tell me that they couldn't see
the NT1 on our end. No shit, Sherlock.
This went on for **three months**.
I think they finally got tired of us and switched to another pair just to
prove that we're idiots. It backfired, though - it fixed the problem,
despite their insistence that that wasn't the problem. Our NYNEX rep (who
is very good, but gets the same stonewalling from 9X as a customer!) has been
bringing this up and down the food chain, complaining at quality circles,
mentioning it to VPs he runs into and such. We almost lost a dedicated line
customer because of the instability of their connection, and 9X's continued
insistence that it was our problem. Fortunately, our rep is also the 9X rep
for the customer, and has made it perfectly clear that 9X was totally at
fault on this.
There's just too much in LE's favor and against 9X for me to believe 9X's
insistence that it's the hardware. Make sure that you've got the right
switch type; we had a lot of problems when we first deployed ISDN because we
were told the switches were DMS-100 or E5SS (whatever they were), but were
never told that they were provisioned as NI-1's! The result - unstable
connections, until we went and asked the magic question of "How is the switch
provisioned?" This one surprised our rep, who didn't realise there was a
difference. Oy.
========================================================================
Joe Hartley - jh@brainiac.com - brainiac services, inc
PO Box 5069 : Greene, RI : 02827 - vox 401.539.9050 : fax 401.539.2070
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa