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Re: Ameritech Service Quality Report

  • From: Jared Mauch
  • Date: Tue Sep 05 18:51:31 2000

	(hi steve!)

	I have found that most carriers abilities (Including Ameritech)
to test ds3 and greater circuits is very poor also.  Most require a CO
dispatch, and none of their sites are manned, nor do they have remote
testing access to put up a loop at a sonet element (very frustrating)
for testing.

	T1's (or other circuits that can be looped up) tend to get
fixed fairly frequently, but I have found that some locations
have chronic problems, either because there are problems with the
smartjack shelves that they use, or because there are very intermittent
problems with the pairs into a location.

	On resold circuits (such as Covad dsl loops to customers),
trouble is typically cleared within 24 hours of them isolating
the problem with Ameritech, but this typically becomes a 3+ day ETR
on services I have experienced.

	Friends that have recently moved I have heard have waited 45+
days for POTS installs of residental telephone service.

	I do think that it has been very shortsighted of Ameritech to
not have started to roll out more fiber huts to bring services on fiber
to the CO.  I know there is a hut less than a mile from my home, but
most people in my area run directly to the CO (4+ miles away) instead of
going to this hut, which would free up more services.

	I have also found it very tiring that Ameritech closes
tickets without contacting us, or "because that's our policy", without
reporting back if they found trouble.  Hiring a few more people
to answer the phones for the hicap services would be nice too.. I
have had problems getting into some of their queues, as once they
are full, you can't get in any further.. /sigh

	Their 4 hour times for hicap services are also misleading, as
that gives them 4 hours to find a tech before escalation, not 4 hours
to fix the service.

	- Jared

	
On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 03:31:31PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
> It's been about five months since I last dealt with Ameritech in Michigan,
> but prior to that I was dealing with them on a pretty much daily basis for
> a few years.
> 
> I may be forgetting something, but I don't remember ever having a five day
> repair time on a previously working HiCap circuit.  I had one that took
> two or three days once, involving what was apparrently a particularly
> nasty wet cable problem on some underground copper, but according to our
> customer Ameritech did have people out there working on it for much of the
> outage period.  More often I'd wait on hold for an hour before finally
> talking to somebody who would open a ticket and have a tester call me back
> an hour or so later.  Then, if it was an internal problem rather than
> something requiring a dispatch, they'd generally get it fixed pretty
> quickly.  If it required a dispatch, they'd still generally be able to get
> somebody out to the site within a few hours.  The hold times were never
> what I considered acceptable, and several circuits had the same problems
> multiple times, but it was nothing like what Sean's summary, or the first
> couple pages of that Ameritech report (I haven't read the rest yet), would
> seem to imply.
> 
> Residential or small business repair is another story, and week lead
> times, before escallation, seemed pretty typical.  With escallation, it
> was generally possible to get that down to two or three days, which could
> still be pretty bad.
> 
> My impression is that most carriers promising four hour repair times are
> selling HiCap type stuff, where those lead times may be almost possible.
> 
> -Steve
> 
> On 3 Sep 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The Michigan Public Service Commission has launched an investigation
> > into Ameritech's service quality.  According to Ameritech, in August
> > the estimated average repair time will be 115 hours (almost 5 days).
> > Significantly up over previous years' average repair times of about
> > a day (25-28 hours).
> > 
> > http://www.cis.state.mi.us/mpsc/comm/ameritech.htm
> > 
> > What I find interesting isn't Ameritech's long repair times, but how
> > do providers promise 4 hour repair times when the dominant local loop
> > provider takes over a day to fix something on a good day.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Steve Gibbard				[email protected]	
> 

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from [email protected]
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.
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