[ale] OT: Advice / help

[Jim Popovitch]

James P. Kinney III wrote:
> I am deeply suspicious about the T1 connection that BS provides. 

This reminds me of a good lesson I learned years ago.  We had a T1 from 
Savvis (back before they consumed C&W USA).  Late one afternoon we 
experienced a complete outage (it happens sometimes).  In this case we 
called Savvis and started our 1-hour response period.  59 minutes later 
we got a call from their NOC that they were escalating to Worldcom (back 
  when Bernie was still running things).  Our one hour response turned 
into another 1 hour wait (Savvis' SLA w/ Worldcom).  Another 59 minutes 
later the Savvis NOC calls again to explain that Worldcom is escalating 
to BellSouth.  In those days we did a fair amount of work w/ BellSouth 
and knew their internal ops/proceedures pretty well.  We talked the 
Savvis people into giving us their WCom ticket number, and then called 
WCom and got their BellSouth ticket number, and then we called 
BellSouth's WCom desk to get a status update.  After a few minutes of 
q&a, the BellSouth op asked us for some WCom details that we weren't 
privy to, and she soon realized that we weren't WCom (we never pretened 
to be, but we were calling the behind-the-scenes WCom/BellSouth support 
center and should have known the details).  The BellSouth girl decided 
to "get even" and closed the ticket and went home for the day.  :-)

In the end Savvis re-opened the ticket, got WCom back engaged, and 
around 2AM the BellSouth tech showed up and replaced a card in the 
underground shack up by the road (which flooded a few days later, but 
that's another story).  The moral of this story is two fold: 1) SLAs are 
meaningless when multiple providers are involved, always read the fine 
print.  2) BellSouth's operators (and other ILEC ops for that matter) 
are like Mother Nature, you don't want to be caught fooling them.  :-)

Wrt CBeyond... I know several very good people there, some have been 
there for years.  Quality geeks who helped build up such companies as 
Knology, MindSpring, and NetRail.  Every company can make all the 
promises in the world, but if there is one that can deliver on them it's 
the engineers at CBeyond.  Fwiw, I also know engineers at BellSouth too, 
so YMMV. ;-)

-Jim P.