Re: DSL problems (PacBell and Covad)

[Travis Pugh <tpugh () shore net>]

I don't know if it is policy across BA turf, but they are telling us that
Massachusetts response time for a trouble ticket is 72 hours.  If a whole
CO goes down, someone's got to respond.  If a single circuit goes down, it
can take up to 72 hours for the tester to pick up your ticket.

So your 2 5 day outages can be: 1-2 days to pick up the ticket, 1-2 days
of claiming it is CPE or someone else's problem, 1 day to fix.

As to the other provider scenario, Covad and Northpoint sell SDSL services
in MA on BA circuits, but they get far better response times out of BA
than BA customers do.  You can get a ticket and have a vendor meet on site
in as little as 2 days.  Apparently Covad and Northpoint are able to
negotiate better support than BA is willing to give it's customers and BA
ADSL resellers ... makes you wonder why they missed their "800,000
installed line" quota by several hundred thousand circuits.

-travis

On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Nick Bastin wrote:

> This is also the case for Bell Atlantic.  I've been down twice in the last
> two month for over 5 days (at my home), and I know of several other
> customers who have had multi-day outages.  Widespread outages seem to be
> resolved within 24-48 hours (DC/Nor VA/MD was down recently for almost 2
> days), which is bad enough, but problems invoving a single CO, or just a
> few customers, tend to be resolved whenever someone at BA feels like
> finding something to do, which apparently isn't often.  Call support is
> terrible as well, but we won't even go into that.
>
> Normally, with issues like this, I'd say tough luck and find yourself
> another provider, but in most of these long-outage cases, at least on the
> east coast, the problem has been with the circuit being down, which, in
> most areas, is still provided by your telco.  So even if you had a
> different provider supplying your connection (Flashcom, etc.), you would
> still be down.
>
> I thought this was supposed to be a competitive market?
>
> --
> Nick Bastin
> Software Developer
> OPNET Technologies