North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Ameritech Service Quality Report

  • From: Jeff Ogden
  • Date: Wed Sep 06 08:19:22 2000

I agree that most of the noise in Michigan is about residential repair times. Repair times for leased data circuits could always be better, but don't seem to be nearly as bad as what people are experiencing for residential repair. For leased data circuits repair of previously installed and working circuits could be faster, but doesn't usually take weeks. However, installs of new leased data circuits is a different story. Delivery dates for new installs are more or less meaningless and it can take weeks or months longer than promised to get a new circuit installed. I agree that things get worse as you start to move up to higher speed circuits. I agree that waiting on hold to talk to someone about repairs is a big problem. Coordination between IXCs and Ameritech also seems very poor at times. As best we can tell the problems are not specific to Michigan and seem to be occurring in all Ameritech states. These problems aren't new, but have been building over a long period of time.

My real question is what can be done about this other than complaining on this or similar lists? Are the PSCs in the states served by Ameritech likely to take effective action? The Michigan PSC is pretty weak and I am not too sure that they will be able to make much of a difference. Is Ameritech likely to fix the problems on their own given some time? Since Ameritech is now SBC, what is SBC's track record in this area in other states? I've heard rumors from other areas where SBC has purchased an ILEC that this sort of poor service is pretty common, but this is only rumors.

One of the claims is that a large part of the problem is due to too few staff and that in turn is due to the very tight national labor market. If this is true, it would seem that these sorts of problems would be occurring throughout the country and wouldn't be limited to one region or one company. How does Ameritech compare to other LECs?

-Jeff Ogden
Merit


At 3:31 PM -0700 9/5/00, 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.
>
>
>
>

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Steve Gibbard [email protected]