On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Joe Hartley wrote:
>
> On 29-Jul-97 "Rich Brennan" wrote:
> >NYNEX claims its the equipment, and the continued silence from Livingston
> >makes me believe them.
>
> 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
>