Communications black hole

[altivo]

I swear, today's telephone companies are less competent than ever. It appears that since about 10 am this morning, my town has been cut off entirely from the rest of the state. We can call each other (same exchange) but not to any other number outside our local exchange. Callers outside get a fast busy signal if they try to dial us. Repeated reports to SBC on the situation produce no acknowledgement or admission that there is a problem. Of course, you can't actually report the problem from inside town, because there are no local operators or anything like that any more. All calls to reach service or the business office are routed to Timbuktu and back, so of course, all get the fast busy.

Tin cans and string work better than SBC. I gather that cell phones are faring no better locally, since the closest towers are linked to the network by landlines that, yep, pass through the same central exchange. Dead end.

(No, I'm not anywhere near the storm area where they have valid excuse for difficulties. No wind or rain here in a couple of weeks in fact.)

Edit: Services restored shortly before 5 pm local. About six hours of outage. Among other things, 911 service was unreachable from all numbers on the exchange because the dispatchers are located in another town nine miles away. So far, SBC is still not acknowledging that there was a problem. Could have been an equipment failure, such things happen. Or a cable cut somewhere, though I think that would take them longer to fix, since the closest repair crews capable of anything as complex as that are 40 miles away or more. I think it more likely that someone made an error while programming the ESS and simply cut us off by routing things incorrectly.

Comments

[corelog.livejournal.com]

That is fucking-a ridiculous. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's typical. Don't get me started on the months it took to get them to pick a phone line up that was lying on the ground in our front yard. Or how many times the local brats knocked over the already damaged junction box by the road, disconnecting multiple lines, before they finally replaced it instead of patching it up with duct tape.

No wonder they can't offer ADSL in this area. They don't have the brains necessary to get it working.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

Well, and SBC is also notorious for using the way, way, WAAAAAAAAYYYY outdated ENTERNET 300 software to manage their connections. The freeware RASPPPOE does far better.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'll take your word for it. You've just stepped beyond my level of practical knowledge. ;)

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

SBC is about the least responsive company I know of. They're a perfect example of what's wrong with big business today.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Their excuse is that they can't make a profit off us and need to double our already ridiculously high rates.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

Ah, you have no wind and rain, but I hear there's a serious tin-can and string shortage.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There are plenty of tin cans and strings. But they don't have any technicians who know how to hook them up. All the competent ones were released or laid off years ago to save money. You have to pay more for experienced personnel.

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

Well, as a radio technician, we often have to call Verizon to fix their phone lines. There's a joke going around the shop that the IQ goes down in direct proportion to the number of telephone technicians working on a problem.

Honestly, I don't know where they hire their techs from, but half of them couldn't hook up a doorbell to a dry-cell and have it work right.

There are a couple of good guys in the Special Circuits division that actually know about line loss, frequency response, and loop resistance, but not many.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have dozens of horror stories. My favorite is having the college T-1 installed some years back. They were scheduled, and as far as we could tell, never showed up. SBC insisted that their man had come out and done it. Asked where the drop was, they couldn't tell us, and couldn't find it themselves. It took a full week and several visits before they admitted that it had never been done at all and finally got the line in.

Then there were the voice telephone listings. Somehow, instead of listing the various departments under the name of the college, they sent each one off to its own section of the alphabet. So "English Dept." was under E, and "Library" was under L, and "Art Dept." was under A, etc. Absolutely useless in a phone book for the whole city of Chicago. Every year when the new phone book came out, it would still be the same, and we would call and scream at them and they'd promise to fix it. And the next year it would still be the same. Worse yet, they propagated that error to all the directory assistance listings in the US. We knew this because the library reference desk kept getting long distance calls intended for the Chicago Public Library. So their own directory assistance personnel, when asked for the Chicago Public Library number, were looking under "library" instead of under "Chicago, City of". Last time I checked, that problem still hadn't been fixed, and it has now been almost ten years.

[doco.livejournal.com]

We've had that last Tuesday. Only that it was 300,000 landlines that got knocked off the grid. :)

(Bulldozer hit an OC-3 line)