Verizon mail troubles

Thu Jan 29 04:12:00 UTC 2004

Andy Dills wrote:

>Verizon? Colo? ISP?
>
>  
>
Probably should have expressed that more clearly. Not colo'ing at 
Verizon, but an Internet colocation facility that also provides it's 
customers with T1 and Frame Relay connectivity to the Internet.

>But they've never had a sonet outage once in our entire time of doing
>business with them. So they do employ competent people. Plenty of them.
>But they aren't concerned with IP or SMTP.
>
>  
>
This is in NJ, also "native" ex-Bell Atlantic territory. And I agree 
they have competent people...  But I would dispute "Plenty of them." In 
fact, I think this is where I saw the biggest problem: getting a 
response from a Verizon tech in a reasonable time when dealing with an 
outage. Most of the outages were "last mile" type outages, but we did 
have them mess up some frame relay connections out of the blue with a 
broken switch configuration.

And if it should be a circuit from NJ to PA via their special "conduit" 
between the LATAs, it became a finger-pointing nightmare, since the NJ 
group would say it's the PA group, who'd disagree, and then there's the 
group responsible for the conduit, which is a separate group from either 
of them.

And to be fair, this colo facility wasn't that large, buying T3's worth 
of T1's at a time, whereas the place I was at before had around 6-10K 
data and voice circuits worldwide that they managed, and the major IXCs 
had on-site personnel. But even without the on-site folks involved, 
dealing with the IXCs was a much better experience, more "polished," 
with good SLAs and escalation paths.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack a search for a Verizon Internet admin. :-) 
We now return you to your mail/worm discussion, already in progress.

Bob