The world of Telco

The world of telco. It seems so simple to us, but at times it can be hair pulling and mind numbing. To most people it just seems like smoke and mirrors on how they get their connections, to us who provide network services it’s a never ending battle of proving who’s right and who’s gear it is. Lets start with todays example. I have been hooking up a series of sites for a client. They are on a quest to get all of there sites off random cable/sat modems to 1 unifed network. By the way hats off to the guy who got the initial setup done, some fancy tricks done with IOS firewall that I will be borrowing from you ☺. The site in particular I had the circuit delivered to one site much earlier so I took advantage and got loops up from the telco’s gear on the other site. UP/UP. I’m thinking this is going to be easy turn up. WRONG. 1st problem. On the other side the circuit was finally delivered, the problem was that the circuit delivery point and my facility had some distance between them. Those guys just extended the circuit not even thinking about that a T1 signal can’t go that far. To be fair this was a free service. I guess paid service they would have thought about that. So I had to rush out and get repeaters(not really rush I just grabbed them off the shelf and get them shipped). Ok done that simple. Site turn up day. The guys had the circuit patched wrong. That took a few min to fix. Then I stripped down a pair got them to the 66 block and Repeater. Got the repeater to the other side and do the same process. Repeaters sink up. Easy day. Nope. After on the phone with the Telco they are telling me we have a pair flipped wrong. Now the guys I were working with where some country bumpkins, but I had a strong feeling they knew what they were doing and the telco’s history has been shaky. So what I do is run back to my equipment use a female loopback and look the circuit back to the telco. They see it up., I unplug it and they see it UP!!!! Power down the Repeater they see it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Pull the cable from the smart jack and guess what it was UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Those bastards have a loop in the circuit after insisting is was our end. I don’t have a happy ending to this story just more of a rant of my world of telco’s. Happy Networking!!!!!!!!