If the bells werent so bell like, it would be a lot harder to win business from them. A colleague of mine is fond of asserting that the peter principle applies to corporations as a whole. Joe Warren Bailey wrote:

Spoken like a true ATT customer..;)

From my Android phone on T-Mobile. The first nationwide 4G network.

-------- Original message -------- From: Brent Jones <brent@brentrjones.com> Date: 01/28/2013 10:07 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Joe Maimon <jmaimon@ttec.com> Cc: North American Networking and Offtopic Gripes List <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Looking for success stories in Qwest/Centurylink land

s/CenturyLink/ATT and I've got plenty of good stories for you. I think the big telcos these days simply don't care, and don't understand. They hire sales drones from Wal-Mart, and expect them to put in orders for longhaul circuits, or metro ethernet, and what you get is samples of perfume or pizza delivery.

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Joe Maimon <jmaimon@ttec.com> wrote:

...

Anybody have some happy success stories to share about service in Qwest service area post Centurylink acquisition?

Unfortunately the ones I have contain more humor than success.

Story #1

Ethernet/Fiber service near Tampa ordered via partner, misordered as MPLS, re-ordered as vpls.

Delivered by June, I have been trying unsuccessfully to get a MAC off the NID ever since.

Similarly, I have been unsuccessful in getting the LEC onsite to troubleshoot the NID. My last update was a due date of 2/22, after they missed a 1/17 date. Nope, not a typo.

Story #2

Ethernet/Fiber service in Phoenix ordered via partner. Apparently, in order to save on the expense of the NID/switch combo, the LEC ran the second set of fiber strands up to an existing customer in the building, using dedicated conduit from the building dmarc (which is accessible by our customer).

They then instructed us to run copper back from their customer back to our customer's space. This recipient of the new fiber refused permission (not to mention being unhappy at unwittingly providing shared service).

LEC claims the order was marked closed and delivered and any changes are new orders that will take 45 days. There has not been an update since, although presumably, we are on the 45 day clock.

Due on the 1st, delivered in mid December, this is a month late with no timely resolution in sight.

I have been assured by everyone involved that escalation has been pursued to the highest levels, including pleading with the CEO of the unwitting service providing customer, to no avail.

If someone from Centurylink who can make things happen and be privy to the real dealings would please reach out directly to me, I have high hopes that there can be happy endings for these stories.

Or if anybody has any useful suggestions, ideas, advice, or even commiserations, all are welcome to share.

Best,

Joe

-- Brent Jones brent@brentrjones.com

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, that's AT&T for you: already has the network, already has the price structure, already has the marketing going, already has all the passive and active equipment installed that's capable of vastly superior speeds, already has the customers willing to pay more each month for faster speeds, and already has customers abandoning FTTU services because of artificially-imposed speed limitations, yet T still can't be bothered to flip some provisioning bits.

And then there's the ATT U-Verse outage for the better part of a week. http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/24/tech/web/uverse-outage-att/index.html On the other hand, I've been unsuccessfully trying to pay my Verizon Fios bill for a month now. The credit card died two months ago. They keep trying to bill it. Can't log in to the linked account online. The web site mentions that a temporary password can be had from the paper bill they haven't sent in the better part of a decade. After hours on the phone the representative "opened a ticket with IT." They sent me an email reminding me that their billing failed. With no return contact information, just an invitation to log in to my non-working account and pay it. What fun! -Bill -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

My experience with one of the big 2 telcos in the USA is unbelievable even now looking back a few months: 1. at my key network monitoring site telco Northern Telecom (before NT changed their name to Nortel) SONET equipment circa 1995 kept failing, taking legacy circuits down hard. 2. Escalating the problem to the account team resulted in their maintaining that there were no SONET alarms at the telco monitoring site, so nothing could be done. 3. At the 4th SONET outage, the telco discovered that the Northern Telecom alarm component had failed which explained why there were no alarms for the previous outages. 4. Despite all of the outages to a key location, the telco took 8 months to replace the NT equipment with modern MSPP equipment. During job walks with the telco, the telco OSP engineers insisted that the NT equipment was still good since "it is still working", and tried to talk me out of insisting that they upgrade their NT equipment. The above anecdote is typical in my experience with the telcos, and underscores the need for a national broadband buildout in the USA, funded and run by the Federal Government, based upon the Australian National Broadband Network model. The USA telcos have had their chance, in my opinion, now is the time for them to get out of the way. Here is a link to the Australian National Broadband site, describing how the existing telco-owned copper network will be "switched off": http://www.nbn.gov.au/2012/12/03/did-you-know-that-our-copper-network-is-bei... David On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc@gmail.com

wrote:

On 28 January 2013 10:35, Warren Bailey <wbailey@satelliteintelligencegroup.com> wrote:

...

Spoken like a true ATT customer..;)

I've had an AT&T FTTU in my bedroom closet, which was an Alcatel HONT-C (4 POTS (unused), 1 Ethernet; 155.52 Mbps upstream and 622.08 Mbps downstream; shared with at most 32 users), and AT&T California outright refused to provision the U-verse internet at anything higher than 18Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream, at a time when their web-site loudly offered a 24Mbps tier for the general public for 10 extra bucks.

Yes, this was at a time when VDSL2 users were already provisioned 24Mbps down and 3Mbps up; FTTU users weren't privileged as such (and probably still aren't to this day).

AT&T FTTU experience starts with the installation: you have a fibre technician that calls you prior to the date of the centrally-scheduled appointment, and tells you that you'll have an extra appointment prior (and in addition) to the original pre-scheduled appointment date. He'll also likely confide in you that that's the way things work at T -- he has to schedule his own appointments for FTTU ONT installation, and no single customer is beforehand informed of any such appointments.

Then in a misunderstanding that something can be done to get the advertised speeds that certainly must be supported by the installed ONT, you can spend hours with sales, tech support and the AT&T California executive office, who will all give all sorts of excuses that you are too long from the CO / VRAD / etc etc. Whereas in reality AT&T is simply too lazy to update their FTTU provisioning profiles, and not a single FTTU installation is being offered any internet services above 18Mbps. (Somehow, it is my impression that noone in the company even knows this for a fact -- I've not had a single over-the-phone representative confirm that 24Mbps tier is never offered for FTTU.)

Note that even if you disregard the fact that Verizon successfully delivers 25/25, 50/20 and many other tiers over essentially the same technology, the simple math of 622/155 divided by 32 users turns out to be higher than 18/1.5, and especially several factors higher than the 1.5 part of 18/1.5. This does not even account for many people getting the cheapest and slower tiers, or the fact that the whole point of FTTU BPON is overprovisioning support.

Well, that's AT&T for you: already has the network, already has the price structure, already has the marketing going, already has all the passive and active equipment installed that's capable of vastly superior speeds, already has the customers willing to pay more each month for faster speeds, and already has customers abandoning FTTU services because of artificially-imposed speed limitations, yet T still can't be bothered to flip some provisioning bits.

C.

Constantine A. Murenin wrote:

On 28 January 2013 13:57, david peahi <davidpeahi@gmail.com> wrote:

...

http://www.nbn.gov.au/2012/12/03/did-you-know-that-our-copper-network-is-bei...

Do they have any customers object?

I recall a few recent stories about Verizon having problems after Sandy with NYC customers insisting that they want DSL restored instead of the FiOS brought in.

C.

Copper services are still down in the neighborhood. Fiber is not a UNE.

On 1/29/13 1:20 AM, Rob McEwen wrote:

[...] the US Federal government:

(A) ...cannot do a darn thing without MASSIVE graft & corruption... plus massive overruns in costs... including a HEAVY dose of "crony capitalism" where, often, the companies who get the contracts are the ones who pad the wallets of the politicians in charge. [...]

Ummm, this isn't true. As all of us old enough to remember know, the ILECs promised that with *REDUCED* regulation they'd roll out universal broadband IFF they were given the revenues from DSL -- putting the CLECs and small ISPs out of the broadband business. The graft and corruption was in *private* industry, not the Federal government, due to lack of regulation and oversight.

(B) In the US, we have this thing called the 4th amendment.... which ensures a certain level of freedom and civil liberties and privacy. Unfortunately, 4th amendment rights essentially disappear if the US Federal government owns and operates broadband access. [...]

No, this isn't true either. The 4th Amendment applies to the US government. What happened is the end-around allowing *private* industry to collect personal data and infringe civil liberties. That should not happen with direct US government ownership. It could be a boon to civil liberties.

(C) This allows them to do what the FCC ACTIVELY trying to do recently, but hasn't yet found a way.

[...] Here is an article written by 8 former FCC chairmen about the "Disclose Act":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703460404575244772070710374.ht... ...can any sane person read that article... and then trust the US Federal Gov't motives with owning/operating vast amounts of Broadband?

Ummm, none of these were on the FCC. Some were on the "stacked" Republican F*E*C. And nobody trusts Spakovsky, the architect of voter caging, purges, and suppression -- who was (as we now know) illegally recess appointed to the FEC, and whose nomination was withdrawn after disclosure of conflict of interest and the resignation of half the Justice Department voter section staff!

Finally, while I've witnessed incompetence amongst certain unnamed baby bells, there ARE... MANY... bright spots in Internet connectivity. Frankly, we're spoiled by our successes. And the worst of the baby bells, like all baby bells, do NOT have a monopoly. [...]

You seem to be living in an alternate universe. Those of us who actually owned an ISP know the ILEC oligopolies well. The one bright spot, Google Fiber, does help Internet connectivity, but doesn't help ISPs. And this is the list for operators.

On 1/29/13 8:30 AM, Rob McEwen wrote:

On 1/29/2013 7:43 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote:

...

The graft and corruption was in *private* industry, not the Federal government, due to lack of regulation and oversight.

I never said there wasn't graft and corruption in private industry... but that is anecdotal... "hit and miss". In contrast, graft and corruption in the Federal Government is widespread and rampant. Finding one example of graft and corruption in private industry is a silly way to try to disprove my point.

Actually, "graft and corruption in the Federal Government" is very rare. State and local government is more common, and the Feds are usually needed to clean up afterward. Note the Kwame Kilpatrick public corruption trial (a big deal around here).... And of course, corruption is incredibly common in the private sector, notably the financial services industry, the realty developer industry, etc.

...

Ummm, none of these were on the FCC. Some were on the "stacked" Republican F*E*C. And nobody trusts Spakovsky, the architect of voter caging, purges, and suppression -- who was (as we now know) illegally recess appointed to the FEC, and whose nomination was withdrawn after disclosure of conflict of interest and the resignation of half the Justice Department voter section staff!

I think you've gone off topic here. The bottom line is that the FCC of the past few years has TRIED to make a crusade out of supposedly protecting us against those meany ISPs' allegedly unfair bandwidth allocation practices... with their proposed solution of "net neutrality"... but, in reality, "net neutrality" is really just a Federal Government power grab where they can then trample the 4th amendment.

Huh? You cited a WSJ opinion piece as from the FCC, when it was FEC, and they are very different entities. Yet you claim I'm off-topic? Net Neutrality has nothing what-so-ever to do with the 4th Amendment.

Why would they do that? Because the current administration is crawling with statist thugs, that is why. They can't help themselves. it is in their blood. (notice that I'm NOT defending the Republican administration FCC, nor do I care to.

You seem very confused, and have devolved into ill-informed racist anti-Obama diatribe that has no place on this list.

Your example is besides the point and not relevant to this conversation. But the attempted "net neutrality" power grab is relevant. Notice ALSO that neither do I defend all practices of ISPs' bandwidth allocations. But, again, their customers do have the option to "vote with their wallets". Such options are lost with a Federal Gov't monopoly.)

The Internet was developed by the Federal Government. I started my first TCP/IP implementation in 1979 on a NOAA+EPA grant; I wrote the legislative boilerplate that provided funding for the NSFnet, and convinced Michigan legislators to support it; then went on to write many technical standards; and built an ISP starting in 1994. The NSFnet wouldn't have been possible without a Federal prosecution, and the resulting AT&T Green decision. With today's oligopolies, there's no way to vote with your wallet. I'm done with this thread. Please don't feed the troll.

On 1/29/13 7:43 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote:

On 1/29/13 1:20 AM, Rob McEwen wrote:

...

[...] the US Federal government:

(A) ...cannot do a darn thing without MASSIVE graft & corruption... plus massive overruns in costs... including a HEAVY dose of "crony capitalism" where, often, the companies who get the contracts are the ones who pad the wallets of the politicians in charge. [...]

Ummm, this isn't true. As all of us old enough to remember know, the ILECs promised that with *REDUCED* regulation they'd roll out universal broadband IFF they were given the revenues from DSL -- putting the CLECs and small ISPs out of the broadband business.

The graft and corruption was in *private* industry, not the Federal government, due to lack of regulation and oversight.

The other big problem with putting the government in charge is that it creates too 'big' of a project. Every large contractor wants a piece of it, every vendor wants a part, and the end result is a specification that is expensive and difficult to build. Then the bidding process to build/supply it starts and takes 3 years plus the 5 years for the lawsuits from everyone who didn't win. By now the specification is well out of date but we start building it anyway. Yeah - it's built. But we need to upgrade it.... Repeat the above. Don't believe it? Take a look at a much smaller Federal system - Air Traffic Control and the attempts to upgrade that system. Why would "Federal Internet" be any different? -- Mark Radabaugh Amplex mark@amplex.net 419.837.5015

On 1/29/2013 11:38 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

So where are all the arrests and convictions for the mortgage games and other Wall Street malfeasance that led to the financial crisis of 2008? Seems that was a tad more egregious than anything Enron did, so there should have been more arrests and convictions?

Not everyone gets caught. But across the board, corrupt private businesses get caught & pay a price and/or disappear ...far more often than corrupt government entities. But even with the financial crisis of 2008, there was SOME reckoning. Bernie Madoff is in jail. Lots of CEOs lost their jobs. Boards of Fortune 500 companies are NOW... FINALLY... doing the due diligence that used to not get done. Those things have to be done since everyone if fighting for survival right now. Nobody can afford to do less... except the Feds... who continue to operate/spend like its 1999. More locally, on a smaller scale, I know of specific appraisers & real estate investors who are in jail right now because they finally got caught in a scam where (1) the investor would buy a property at a low price, (2) his appraiser, who was in on the scam, would issue an appraisal that was ridiculously high, (3) the real estate investor would then get a LARGE loan on that property, (4) the investor would then spend that money on "expenses"... showing no money "on paper", it was "laundered" (5) investor would declare bankruptcy and give those properties back to the bank. (6) bank discovers that their "collateral" on a 200K loan is really worth 40K. (repeat times 10 since the investor did this several times over just before declaring bankruptcy. Again, those guys are in jail. And the rules on preventing that have been tightened. I agree, not enough people like that went to jail... but LESS of this gets caught and punished with regard to the Federal government's graft & corruption. -- Rob McEwen http://dnsbl.invaluement.com/ rob@invaluement.com +1 (478) 475-9032

----- Original Message ----- From: <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> To: "Rob McEwen" <rob@invaluement.com> Cc: <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 6:38 AM Subject: Re: Looking for success stories in Qwest/Centurylink land snip

So where are all the arrests and convictions for the mortgage games and other Wall Street malfeasance that led to the financial crisis of 2008? Seems that was a tad more egregious than anything Enron did, so there should have been more arrests and convictions?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-201...

On 1/28/13 8:06 PM, Randy Bush wrote:

...

Anybody have some happy success stories to share about service in Qwest service area post Centurylink acquisition?

yes. switched my WA residential to comcast. *much* happier.

Thanks, that made me laugh. Myself, for residential, have long left ATT/SBC/Ameritech behind, and used Comcast (nee MediaOne) for years, but am now happiest with WOW (wowway). On the ATT front, I had a campaign this past fall that setup its headquarters in a strip mall. Very time sensitive, campaigns need short term office space for about 2 months. Actually, *this* campaign (you really want to watch this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v52FLMOPSig No Comcast or anything other than ATT available. But the site was a former bank (it moved to the other end of the strip mall), and there are lots of T1 terminal blocks all ready to go, and the site has lots of wiring in place. So, no problem? HA! Getting them to sell you service: No, sorry, no actual T1s anymore. No U-Verse available (yet I can see the U-Verse labels in the neighborhood on the other side of the fence), they only offer business ADSL over those lines now, 3 times the price of U-Verse at less than half the speed. (We didn't want ADSL, because we're running our own VoIP phones and Google Voice, so preferred symmetric bandwidth.) Getting them to install service: I can read them the block and circuit labels 'til I'm blue in the face, but they have to roll a truck. The order specifically says they have to call my cell an hour in advance so I can get there and have maintenance open the dmarc. They don't call. Heck, they don't come to the right place -- apparently something in the master list tells them the bank has moved, so they go to the bank -- wrong location and different dmarc door. Again, and again, and again! Finally, after daily calls for a week, and 30+ hours of my time, a very helpful customer support Democrat in Las Vegas puts all the right things in place, and helpfully calls me during the install to ensure it's actually starting, as the truck rolls up. Bless her!!! The installer also explains that nobody likes to call in advance, because those trips cut down on their daily total, and lots of them are really treated like "independent" contractors. Unlike the old days, they don't have any responsibility for their own areas and that's why the dmarcs have fallen into utter disrepair. It's not the longest or worst install I've ever had -- that prize goes to the old Bell South -- but pretty high profile nerve wracking. Yet ATT kept trying to bill for the week without service. Anyway, she did win the election.... :-)