Re: I call bullshit.
The one-time and fixed recurring costs of the ISDN lines would have been peanuts - especially in Germany where it was not at all uncommon for domestic phone lines to be ISDN instead of POTS.
Most of the 100k would have been the cost of two international phone calls connected 24/7.
“This was massively expensive, but was only needed for two weeks before we could place the order for broadband...."
James doesn't mention it so we know neither if his budget mentioned 12.5 k weekly communications costs nor if he had the plan and wherewithal to bring down the connection outside business hours.
For me the fishy bit was that there were only a couple of weeks before he could ORDER the broadband connection. The provisioning time for any corporate quality line that I worked with during that period was measured in weeks, not days, even for SDSL. So unless his planned solution was something like domestic DSL he was probably lucky that he was let go and his former IT Director took the heat for the phone bill.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
