On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:04:14 PST, jacob miller said:
The tracking of Customer circuits to ensure that from marketing, sales, accounts and technical department everything to do with the circuits has to be tracked.
Reading the NANOG archives will find enough examples of top telcos that *never* managed to correctly bill for a T-1 that it's safe to assume that quite often, such tracking does not, in fact, actually happen.
Anyone with any help in regards to top software that can be used to run such a telco to ensure that world class service is obtained will be crucial.
World class service? Usually provided by the non-top telcos, and used as a marketing feature. World class service doesn't come from software, it comes from corporate culture. Software doesn't make you hold your customers hostage in a peering dispute, management decisions do that. And most customers don't think being held hostage is world class service - and only top telcos have enough customers to make a peering displute feasible. (Long-time readers can probably think of enough examples to run out of examples to count on the fingers of one hand, even in base 3 ;) And at one time, there were plenty of small companies that made their living based on providing world-class service. You wanted some special one-off setup? No problem, their CFO and CTO would drive over and discuss pricing and terms - which usually included "and if it crashes at 2AM, call me on my cell". You wanted to discuss a config change on 10 minutes notice at 11PM on a Friday, no problem. (What ever happened to those companies, anyhow?) Hypothesis: The actual quality of service delivered is inversely proportional to the ability of the provider to deploy off-the-shelf enterprise-class software. If you can afford it, but your service is still generic enough to use COTS software, you're not delivering world-class service.