Fiber Network Equipment Commercial Norms

Wed Sep 22 23:59:58 UTC 2021

On 23/9/21 3:01 am, Grant Taylor via NANOG wrote:
> On 9/22/21 10:45 AM, Lady Benjamin Cannon of Glencoe, ASCE wrote:
>> Half-penny pinching “mah powah” landlords are especially annoying in a
>> cosmic sense
> 
> I know someone who had a bit of a different experience.
> 
> Someone, purportedly the telco but I'm not sure who, had telco equipment
> in a building and the batteries hadn't been serviced in the better part
> of a decade and there was a strong smell of battery acid in the room.
> 
> I heard that building management put a hard line of something like 36
> hours for the equipment owner to address the problem, or at least
> respond with an acceptable time line, lest the building electrician
> would remove the batteries as a health and safety concern.
> 
> The equipment owner materialized and removed the batteries within 72
> hours.  The bulk of the equipment was removed the following month.

Potential acid leaks are nothing to sneeze at. Maybe two years ago we
were doing an audit to see if we could find where all the analog phone
lines we were paying for in a building were. As part of this was some
waiting around in the MDF room while one of my coworkers dug through
patch logs. I noticed what looked near certain to be internal battery
acid leakage within one of the telco racks in the room, called the telco
on their infrastructure faults line (outsourced to a foreign country of
course, but still), and *within an hour* had a tech outside the building.

A friend of mine has also had success pointing out (to the same normally
recalcitrant telco) that the building was being demolished, and their
equipment was going whether they liked it or not, which solved a then
months-ongoing problem.