Different customer service reactions (was Re: Wanted: Clueful Individual @ TeleGlobe.net)
On Sun, 16 July 2000, Troy Davis wrote:
This mirrors my experience with the AT&T NOC on Friday after seeing latency between GlobalCenter and AT&T. The GlobalCenter NOC had no problem opening a ticket without caring whether I was a customer or not. They spent a few hours on it and said it appeared to be an over-loaded AT&T router.
Not entirely sure of that - and if it was true, wanting to see what AT&T was doing about it - I called AT&T, was transferred 3 times to reach the IP folks, and was promptly stonewalled.
Interesting, neither company solved your problem, but your reaction was very different to how the different companies handled your call. I guess different companies feel it makes business sense to have such policies. I don't know if it is cultural or what. ISPs which were originally independent companies seem to have more open trouble ticket policies than ISPs formed by telcos. Genuity/BBN and UUNET (I distinguish UUNET from the rest of Worldcom) had relatively open trouble ticket policies. Sprint and MCI had restricted trouble ticket policies. Whats even more interesting is the frustration refusing to even look at a problem creates last a long time. Even if they later fix the problem, it won't make up for the difficulty in getting them to look at it. Sprint blackholed one of my customer's routes for three days, and argued with me for days how it wasn't their responsibility and wouldn't open a ticket. After I eventually proved beyond any reasonable doubt it was in fact a Sprint router making the bogus announcement and got a Sprint engineer to fix their router, to this day I still mention how difficult it is to get Sprint to fix a problem in their network because they'll ignore it as long as they can.
On 16 Jul 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
Interesting, neither company solved your problem, but your reaction was very different to how the different companies handled your call. I guess different companies feel it makes business sense to have such policies.
I don't know if it is cultural or what. ISPs which were originally independent companies seem to have more open trouble ticket policies than ISPs formed by telcos. Genuity/BBN and UUNET (I distinguish UUNET from the rest of Worldcom) had relatively open trouble ticket policies. Sprint and MCI had restricted trouble ticket policies.
You've nailed it with the word "telcos", Sean.
Whats even more interesting is the frustration refusing to even look at a problem creates last a long time. Even if they later fix the problem, it won't make up for the difficulty in getting them to look at it. Sprint blackholed one of my customer's routes for three days, and argued with me for days how it wasn't their responsibility and wouldn't open a ticket. After I eventually proved beyond any reasonable doubt it was in fact a Sprint router making the bogus announcement and got a Sprint engineer to fix their router, to this day I still mention how difficult it is to get Sprint to fix a problem in their network because they'll ignore it as long as they can.
It would be interesting to see the outcome of a suit where provider A sued provider B for loss of business and other related damages resulting from just such an incident. I'm not an attorney (I don't even play one on TV) but, it would seem that you would be able to prove callous disregard and/or malicious intent. Perhaps I'm wrong. It is still an interesting point to ponder. --- John Fraizer EnterZone, Inc
Many organizations refuse to open tickets for arbitary third parties because otherwise one risks doing the support for ones more slovenly downstreams' customers. Given over 90% of NOC calls are not issues the NOC can or should handle, placing some form of limit on resource given to unknown third parties is normally a useful way of ensuring your customers get better service. I guess argues for the 'hop-by-hop' methodology of interprovider cooperation and problem resolution. However, given there are some NOC's who won't open a trouble ticket for *peers*, or (sometimes amusingly) for *upstreams*, perhaps this is a broken metaphor. Bypass on first-line clue detection is useful. We find 'I am calling from ASnnnn' works well, especially when the NOC response goes 'Q: what's an AS? A: Ask your supervisor'. -- Alex Bligh VP Core Network, Concentric Network Corporation (formerly GX Networks, Xara Networks)
participants (3)
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Alex Bligh -
John Fraizer -
Sean Donelan