One of my clients has 11 sites connected to an MPLS network provided by Sprint and part of that service is proactive monitoring for outages. For the past 3 months Sprint have been unable to contact me when an outage occurs as they cannot update their contact information correctly and when they do contact me (or I call into their support center) they fail to meet their SLA’s of 1 hour on ANY of the many outages we’ve had.
The call I received today is the worst I’ve had. Two days ago one of the lines was disconnected (and Sprint notified). 48 hours later I receive my first phone call from Sprint telling me that there is an outage. 48 hours for a proactive monitor?????? The weird thing is that the ticket stats show they have advised me of the outage but yet again they called the wrong number. I have no idea why they are monitoring a disconnected line but 48 hours to let me know is a VERY slow response time.
Windows Mobile Live is now out – no need to obtain the cached version from google. It really looked like Microsoft were just pushing the date back x number of days after you looked at the web page, but I guess they finally did settle on the 15th to release the package. This version doesn’t include Live messenger though.
If you go to Vonage V Access website you can get a local number that you can call for free via vonage that then lets you enter in another vonage number or 800 number (seems to work for 877 too) which you can then call. Our standard vonage plan only has 500 minutes and doesn’t have unlimited access (we’re on the $15/month plan rather than $25 which is unlimited) so this trick is useful when calling people like Sprint and sitting on hold for ages and not using up any minutes in the plan (Our local number is 614 334 9472)
I could have used my Verizon cell (which is unlimited at weekends) but that doesn’t have a very good speakerphone, whereas the landline has a good speakerphone to listen to hold music with.
A useful database of ways to get a human when calling companies – similar to the Say No to 0870 website in the uk to stop “national rate” call numbers.
If you’ve been trying to get hold of us, our incoming phone is now working properly again. I think my voice over ip number was finally cut off and as Vonage was simul-ringing that number, everyone was getting the busy signal. Not any more. I’ve also got the vtech phone (with answerphone) on beta test at the moment and it seems to work pretty well so far.
So glad I’m not alone – Avaya: IP Office Forum – Tek-Tips
I got a quick response from TimeWarner, with contact details, about my complaint apologizing for the “delay”. I really don’t think 4 months counts as a delay, neither do the excuses that I was told. Will be interesting to see if the formal letter ever shows up. For anyone else having issues I strongly recommend complaining to the Better Business Bureau, after all they may actually do something if the entire customer base complains!
I logged a complaint with the better business bureau yesterday and the complaint has been forwarded to Roadrunner for their comments. Today I get a phone call saying that they are going to credit my account with the amount that I had paid them (how jolly nice of them!) and that they are going to write an official letter of apology to me. Not sure if the letter and the BBB is co-incidental or not…..
Then to top it all off, yesterday my roadrunner went down when the cablemodem lost its connectivity to the cable network. It took about 45 mins of fiddling with combinations of cable network, router and telephone adapter to get everything working – initially nothing was working but then I got the cable modem talking to roadrunner (and the pc attached directly to the modem also talking to the internet) but the netgear router would not get an ip from the cable modem and allow outside connectivity.
Therefore I decided to finally get the linksys wrt54g that I’ve been wanting to get for a while now (it’s a late birthday present) and thankfully I was able to find a version4 router on a display rack- all the ones in the normal shelf were version5 which aren’t hackable (apart from late breaking limited hacks). The other good thing was that they were reduced to $50 from $70.
With this new router I’ll be able to play with the different firmware versions and setup a vpn server. I’d also like to see if I can bridge a test and production lan using the wifi on the two routers – but thats a project for later on……
I am STILL having to deal with Time Warner’s incompetent billing system. The check that we wrote and gave to their employee on the 28th December 2006 was eventually cashed by them on the 1st March. They now reckon this cheque did not go through, they credited my bank account with the payment and want me to investigate. I don’t need to investigate as I have the cheque image in front of me and no balance credit for a months bill. On top of that it has taken two web sessions and two phone calls to stop the auto payment of my account at the end of this month. There is no way I am trusting payment via the bank to these guys if they can bill me an incorrect amount each month.
Yahoo’s Messenger now has voice calling capabilities built into it with free pc to pc communication – nothing new there, but they also have the ability to call standard phone lines including the UK (rates table). The weird thing is that calling London costs 1cent a minute, but calling anywhere else in the uk costs 1.5cents per minute. Still cheap, but weird how they have different prices. Unfortunately you have to pay a minumum of $10 to start with and the prepayment expires after 180 days of purchase or last use. This slight change to the expiry date is good news as it means you can keep the $10 going for a long time as long as you use it once every 6 months.
You also get free voicemail (something that skype charges you for) which is good – with delivery to your yahoo account or IM window.
They should really give you 10 minutes of free calling though so you can try the service to see if the quality is any good before you lay out your money.