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.