OT: internet phones

[Fairlight]

Y'all catch dis heeyah?  Jay Ashworth been jivin' 'bout like:
> 
> If you can't get a backbone to take a router outage report from you
> even though you're not a direct client, you're not a good enough social
> engineer.  :-)

We're talking about situations where you have an issue and you've gone
through 14 different departments in 45min at AT&T, only to be told
something has to be handled by 'x' department.

"Fine, put me through."

"I'm sorry, they don't have a phone in that department."

"This is A T and bloody T!  You're telling me they don't have a PHONE at
one of the world's largest TELEPHONE companies?"

"Yes.  You'll have to submit your problem via email."

*CLICK!*  (More like phone-splintering *SLAM!*.)

That was actually not regarding a router issue, it was regarding email
blacklisting when I had to get someone unblacklisted because they were
totally unfairly and improperly put there.

However, I -have- had issues with UUNet (in their later days, but pre-MCI)
acknowledging issues with their backbones.  I could actually tell them more
information about their network outage than they could tell me--and it
wasn't even a peering issue, it was internal!  (The Raleigh-Durham hop was
notorious for issues when I was working at one site that had that as the
second hop out.)

When I first started my relationship with UUNet, I was very pleased.  Over
a year and a half, they lowered prices but their quality slid bigtime.  It
went from being able to get something sorted on the Sunday of Thanksgiving
weekend at 3am, to not being able to get a firm answer on a fibre cut in
Atlanta during prime time--one call it was a known issue but with no ETA,
another call later it didn't even exist.  And that was from the NOC!  It
got to the point where I was catching outages and reporting them faster
than anyone was noticing from their automated monitoring software at the
NOC, seriously.  They'd take my report, tell me to hold, and then go
verify, "Oh, yes, it looks like it that gateway went down."  I mean, if
you -have- a monitoring system, shouldn't someone be WATHCHING it???  I
fail to see why they should even have to first find out about it from their
customers, but it got to the point that they did.

I've also had "interesting" discussions with the previous owners of both
the West Orange, NY hub (formerly MCI, then C&W, and I forget who owns
it now), and the MAE-East gateway (I can't remember who owned that,
but I talked to them at the time, when SubSpace was at its height of
popularity...which was probably six years back) up that way as well.
Really, it makes you wonder how the net functions at all when you talk to
some of these people.  In the case of those two notorious spots, many times
it didn't.  :-/  West-Orange used to be a bloody UDP black hole.

No stranger to dealing with reporting gateway outages.  No stranger to the
lack of responsiveness you'll encounter at times, either.  What are you
suggesting?  One has to hire them a call-girl, send a fruit basket, and put
them on your Christmas card list in order to get service?  :)

mark->