Re: Help with bad announcement from UUnet

["Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () opaltelecom co uk>]

But

1. Customers are always telling us its a problem at our end and it never
is

2. If we have any outage its always picked up by our network tools

Perhaps I'm being too black and white tho.. if -you- found a problem on my
network, you'd probably email noc@ and perhaps run a whois at RIPE/RADB
and get a couple more noc contacts. 

Now if you email those addresses you will get a response and you will have
someone look at your issue.

The difference is that by knowing these addresses we can assume you're
reasonably technical and quite possibly have a point.

Another difference is that we're not UUNET, and their network can affect a
lot of people and they will get lots of wrong diagnosis to their email and
support line, so this doesnt scale well. Having said that I think I know
enough addresses to still get in contact and thats also true for most
other large NOCs..

Steve

On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Rachel K. Warren wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 12:07:06PM +0000, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> > Why should they talk to you? You're not a paying customer..
> >
> > I get very upset when customers of customers start phoning us up.. 
>
> This really bothers me.
>
> So, if you are starting to have a major outage because of a 
> configuration change, or a circuit goes down, or whatever else might 
> happen, and the first person who contacts you is not a customer, you 
> are going to ignore it, especially if your network tools haven't 
> picked it up yet?  
>
> In another lifetime ago I was working at a network where Gamer 
> Tickets (people playing Everquest and those types of games) would 
> sometimes see the problem before our network tools picked it up.  The 
> Gamers were not direct customers, but we worked on their problems, 
> because a portion of the time there actually was a problem with the 
> network that should be fixed immediately before our Big Customers Who 
> Paid The Company Lots of Money started to call and want SLA or threaten 
> to (and sometimes did) go to another provider.
>
> You can also think of it in the respect of potentially making more money in
> the long run.  If you provide some service to a non-customer and their 
> upstream doesn't provide any, there is a good chance these non-customers 
> turn into customers by purchasing service directly from you instead.
>
> Rachel

-- 
Stephen J. Wilcox
IP Services Manager, Opal Telecom
http://www.opaltelecom.co.uk/
Tel: 0161 222 2000
Fax: 0161 222 2008