4 May: Living with Telcos
Your network engineer orders four T1 lines from locations in City A to a datacenter in City Z via a large telco. He leaves the week before these are to be dropped, and of course, does not document what he was doing or even keep copies of the contracts.
Either way, the lines are in the process of getting installed, and no one you have the contact with at the large telco can tell you the information you need. The order manager “has no cross connect info”, and the sales support engineer tells you to ask the order manager. Naturally, all the contracts and documents restored from the e-mail backups simply describe the datacenter’s address as the A-side location — without any of the specifics you’d need to order a cross connect from the datacenter.
Meanwhile, the installer is turned away from the Z-side location because they didn’t call ahead to schedule an appointment. Call the Z-side building manager and forward the information required to get past security to large-telco. Large-telco tells you that making an appointment in advance and providing the information that security requires to get in is impossible. Somehow this location’s 6000 other private lines were installed through magic.
Moral of the story: However irritating it is to troubleshoot something through a reseller, it is far worse to get something delivered from a large telco.
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