It's been about five months since I last dealt with Ameritech in Michigan, but prior to that I was dealing with them on a pretty much daily basis for a few years. I may be forgetting something, but I don't remember ever having a five day repair time on a previously working HiCap circuit. I had one that took two or three days once, involving what was apparrently a particularly nasty wet cable problem on some underground copper, but according to our customer Ameritech did have people out there working on it for much of the outage period. More often I'd wait on hold for an hour before finally talking to somebody who would open a ticket and have a tester call me back an hour or so later. Then, if it was an internal problem rather than something requiring a dispatch, they'd generally get it fixed pretty quickly. If it required a dispatch, they'd still generally be able to get somebody out to the site within a few hours. The hold times were never what I considered acceptable, and several circuits had the same problems multiple times, but it was nothing like what Sean's summary, or the first couple pages of that Ameritech report (I haven't read the rest yet), would seem to imply. Residential or small business repair is another story, and week lead times, before escallation, seemed pretty typical. With escallation, it was generally possible to get that down to two or three days, which could still be pretty bad. My impression is that most carriers promising four hour repair times are selling HiCap type stuff, where those lead times may be almost possible. -Steve On 3 Sep 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
The Michigan Public Service Commission has launched an investigation into Ameritech's service quality. According to Ameritech, in August the estimated average repair time will be 115 hours (almost 5 days). Significantly up over previous years' average repair times of about a day (25-28 hours).
http://www.cis.state.mi.us/mpsc/comm/ameritech.htm
What I find interesting isn't Ameritech's long repair times, but how do providers promise 4 hour repair times when the dominant local loop provider takes over a day to fix something on a good day.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Gibbard scg@gibbard.org