On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Jeff Ogden wrote:
One of the claims is that a large part of the problem is due to too few staff and that in turn is due to the very tight national labor market. If this is true, it would seem that these sorts of problems would be occurring throughout the country and wouldn't be limited to one region or one company. How does Ameritech compare to other LECs?
Bell Atlantic (verizon?) in Massachusetts is no better. Repair times for hi-cap circuits are about the same (2-4 hours to get someone who can begin to test / troubleshoot). Residential installs aren't as bad as the Ameritech reports seem to indicate. But BA has its own problems: they are suffering massive interoffice capacity shortages in several key Boston-area central offices and lead times on DS3 and above are as bad as 6 months, depending on where you want the circuit. BA is blaming their capacity problems on Y2K preparations rather than the labor market, but it is obvious that they have personnel shortages, especially on the DSL side of the house. It has been a long time since I had to deal with US West or PacBell, but BA North seems to be in no better shape than Ameritech. I'd like to know if this is the state of LECs across the country or a couple of isolated regional problems. travis pugh shore.net
-Jeff Ogden Merit