Servers
A sysadmin in telco hell
At the best of times, telecommunications is a complicated field to navigate. Putting aside the technical difficulties of creating and maintaining a modern telecommunications system, customer support and regulatory compliance can be challenging burdens for organisations of any size to cope with. Even with the best and brightest …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?
I think your comment and questions are rather wildly off topic, and I really recommend this be taken elsewhere. E-mail is probably the most appropriate venue for such a personal discussion, if you feel it must be persued.
Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?
Uh, Trevor, you're the one who brought the subject up. I'm just commentarding, based on my reality. Sorry if that scares you.
Nice to see that you've (apparently) created a FanBoiPage for little ol' me ... I won't be visiting. Too many years of Usenet says "no".
Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?
Sir, someone asked me a question. It was actually raised a couple of times in the thread. I responded with as much detail I reasonably could. From this you somehow decided to extrapolate that I "was unhappy" and felt the need to inject your uninformed viewpoint. This doesn’t “scare me.” It makes me irritated feel sorry for you that you feel this level of unwarranted and undesired personal dialogue is requested or required in such a setting.
The rest of us are trying to have an on topic conversation about the article. Kindly restrict yourself to such, or take the conversation - and your uninformed speculation - to a more appropriate medium.
With a certain major telco here in the UK
the company I work for found out last year that on-site engineers have to go through the same Indian call-centre monkeys as the customers. Lost count of the number of times the guy tried to explain that he's the engineer and yes, the filter is plugged in.
Welcome to my hell
This is why I'm always trying to drive the costs as close to zero as I can; if I'm going to get jerked around I may as well not pay for it. It does not matter who you use (I work with Rogers, Bell, Allstream, VOIP Innovations, Vitelity, voip.ms and Telus to carry our various telecom services) they all make mistakes like this; Rogers did a very similar thing the author describes when porting our numbers from Bell to Primus in a recent drive to save themselves some money, I assume, broke the lines for three days; only a LOT of sleuthing on my part resolved the issue. All supposedly transparent to me, and everyone denying responsibility all the way along.
The number port management in Canada and the US is broken; it's too hard to find out who "owns" the number so you can actually get things fixed.
Re: Welcome to my hell
There are tools out there that will tell you which telco is the parent company. But that does you no good because you can't or are not suppose to talk to that company. The rules are you are suppose to talk to the company that is porting the numbers. The only time you are allowed to talk to the losing telco is if they pull the number early. When that happens the losing telco will often lie and said we released it so the company should be able to just pick it up . That is of course wrong . The process is automated. When orders fall out like this is not easy to just flip a switch. Just because they released the number does not mean they put the route in yet to forward the number to the new telco. The new route may not have a chance to propagate in the losing telco and or the new telco switches yet . When that happens the number can randomly fail.
BT fun
About 4 years ago now, I put in a tariff change on a single business line. Pretty trivial really, you'd think ... until the line went dead. BT Faults said "oh, but you asked for the line to be disconnected! (check) Oh, whoops. You asked for a change of tariff, but it went through as a disconnection instead. Nothing we can do, you'll have to pay a huge early termination fee and order a "new" service to replace the line we cut off by mistake." Weeks later, they had refunded all the hundreds of pounds of wrongly-imposed penalties and reconnected the line, but it took a LOT of calls to many different BT people to fix.
Then there was a domain registered through BT, being transferred to another registrar. Without even confirming receipt of the transfer request, they changed the DNS entries on their end to point MX records at 127.0.0.1 - causing every incoming message to bounce. That didn't make people very happy either, as we waited several days for the new delegation to propagate and cached entries to expire. Of course their answer was "not our customer any more, go away". If they had *stopped* serving DNS records, I could understand, but deliberately causing all mail to bounce with new records of their own? Downright malicious.
Beware of porting numbers out of Verizon . They have a habit of pulling the plug early . Usually with in 48 hours of the port date. Why 48 hours ? Because there is this regulation that says the losing telco can not have direct contact with the customer 48 prior to the port . So it makes the new phone company look bad. Oh any one want to discuss caller ID hell ?
Might be a bit poking the nest with a stick, but...caller ID hell? Now I'm curious.
Because each phone company is responsible for maintaining there own caller ID data base . Lets say I'm small telco . My customers shows up wrong to Comacast customers . All I can do is update with a national data base and hope that Comacast will look there with in 90 days . Comcast insists it's my fault even though I can't touch their caller ID data base . Oh it shows up right to ATT customers
What is?
His punctuation and grammar, or the state of caller ID?
Re: What is?
...the person using a number as a replacement for a letter in their nickname is being a language pedant?
Also: the state of caller ID is terrible.
This topic is closed for new posts.
