Looking for success stories in Qwest/Centurylink land

Mon Jan 28 21:57:21 UTC 2013

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-being-switched-off/

David

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On 28 January 2013 10:35, Warren Bailey
> <wbailey at 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.
>
>