Another long day

Well, we have a couple of exchanges with issues, and of course the faults are just being bounced back saying that there is no problem and the low speed is probaby congestion in the internet. No actual work done to fix the fault. Ho hum...

The fault that sparked all this has the BRAS corrected, probably by fluke. But the engineer being sent to the exchange turned up at the customers house un-announced and tested the line - so that will be us arguing a £160 bill or an engineer! The poor customer still has low throughput even with the right BRAS so we are now having to try and confirm a back-haul congestion issues (of which we have seen many)...

I have been pondering issues. When dealing with such a big company via the normal channels such as the account team and CRM then we are small. Don't get me wrong, we have a good team now. But they work in a part of the business dealing with small ISPs and we don't count when it comes to fixing big things.

However, when normal channels fail us and we have to resort to public embarrassment then we are as big as we are loud... And we are loud. We get noticed. So then things get to director level and someone notices the problems exist.

We had this with IPv6 issues. We raised them for months and finally published the statement they gave us saying they do not support IPv6! That got to director level and they have changed their tune.

So, either they find a way to give us a better voice within their organisation or anything big will always get to the public humiliation stage, which is not good for any of us.

As it is, my understanding is the major issues we have seen may get to director level some time tomorrow due to some convoluted connections, help from a customer, and (of course) my frank blog posts.

We'll see what happens.

Maybe I need to do some consultancy for them...