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.
Recently in Telephones Category
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.
Managed to get a verizon and a Sprint pcmcia adapter to try out the companies wireless internet access via a trial period that the companies had given us. The initial experiences were vastly in favour of the sprint setup as the card needed installing in the slot, the software installed and the GO button clicking on the software to connect to the internet. The verizon card on the other hand needed installing, various usernames and phone numbers entered (no passwords though) and then clicking on one of their two accounts that were created in their applet. At this point the software failed due to username and passwords were not correct - but there had been no questions for the username and password in the installation process and no options within the software to provide this information (even if we knew what to put in). As it turned out, we needed to ring verizon to activate the card before use - not a very good out of the box experience if you have to ring the support line (for a long time) to get the line activated with no instructions to say that you need to do this. The other downside to this process is that you need access to a phone besides the phone card that has just been purchased - which may not be available.
Having said all that, it seems that once the verizon card was setup correctly the performance on the network was a lot better than the Sprint, but I've not had the laptop in my hand to quantify this.
Speaking about Out Of The Box experiences, our new vacuum cleaner had a HUGE red warning sign as the box was opened that said "Stop - Do NOT return to the store" (as did the old cleaner) - this seems to imply that they are expecting a lot of faulty returns as the shops will take the items back no questions asked, whereas the vendor will make you jump through hoops (and make you pay for return shipping).
I got a new phone at work the other day - a Samsung SGH D357. I'm not that impressed with it so far. I do love the fact that when the headset is connected you hear an incoming call ring before it answers. On the previous motorola phone I had it would just autoanswer with no ringing - not a good idea when singing along to the radio in the car.
Anyone had any (good) experiences with installation of an Avaya phone system? I'm just wondering if we're the unfortunate ones to have the worst ever telephone "upgrade" or whether this is normal. I can't go into specifics here but I'm spending about 50% of my work schedule (since the beginning of December) on supporting and troubleshooting the phones.
I'm thinking the phone system needs to be upgraded again - but this time using a piece of string and a couple of empty baked bean cans (although full ones would probably still give better service right now.)
Their voip service of $20 a month including uk calls sounds really good - would be nice to get some user experience though. It would also be good to see if I could link my Asterisk pabx up to it too.
We got our first (and last at this rate!) phone from Verizon this afternoon for the calls for this month. We've not bothered with a home phone number as we don't make that many calls....unfortunately we've received a lot of calls - most of them during the day and after the 500 minutes we get with our monthly allowance, each minute is charged at 45cents. We've had a bill for $282 of calls for Kristen's phone this month!
That is totally unacceptable so we're now quickly looking for an alternative. I'm looking at possibly using timewarner's voip or vonage - both of which I've heard nasty things about. So any recommendations?
I spent the best part of yesterday playing with Asterisk - a free PBX for the home (or business).
From the bbc I found a link to Google Talk - their latest beta product enabling free voip for computer to computer chat.
What I can't understand is the need for yet another im/voice chat running on yet another protocol. Surely all these conflicting services mean people end up with too many ways of communicating so they need to buy faster machines and bigger screens to cope with all the icons in their system tray (I have 19 at the moment!). This also seems to be moving away from the "one number gets me anywhere" philosophy that people would like. Now to get hold of me you can send me an email, ring me on the home phone, the mobile, send me an sms, yahoo, google, msn, aol message me (and you used to be able to contact me via irc but I don't do that anymore).
The big drawback of this app is that it doesn't do talk to landlines.
Update I've added my systray picture to flickr tagged with systray - what does yours look like?
For some weird reason my wifi started to get disconnected whenever the cordless phone was used. Apparently 2.4Ghz phones cause interference with wireless as they operate on the same spectrum. The weird thing is that this was working ok for 3 months without causing obvious dropouts. A bit of searching suggested that changing the channel that the wifi is on should fix or reduce the problem. I changed from channel 11 to 1 (the other end) and the problem didn't go away. I changed it to 6 and still it didn't go away. Interestingly though a wifi card placed about 1' away from the access point with the cordless phone being used downstairs would result in no wifi service. I changed the channel back to 11 last night and for some reason the wifi no longer gets disrupted when the phone is in use.
Seeing as though that is how I started off I am not sure why this problem has occured. Still, at least I can now use the internet when other people are on the phone.
It has been suggested by a paramedic in england that people should program a contact number into their mobile phone under ICE that they would like the emergency services to use if they were found in an accident and unable to talk. This seems a good idea and there are talks about mobile phone companies building this feature into the mobile firmware.
The only drawback I can think of is that some people have their phone locked whilst it is not in use to prevent theft which means paramedics wouldn't be able to get to it (unless this was made available as part of the firmware updates).
The other drawback is that some incredibly stupid phones such as the Samsung that I have don't let you have more than one contact for the same phone number. Therefore, in theory, I can't have Kristen and ICE going to Kristen's phone. The way around this is to program a pause at the end of one of the numbers (or add an extra digit that gets ignored by the phone system) to one of the numbers so that the numbers appear different.
If you have a BT line, then go to BT privacy page you will get free caller id (and signed up for the telephone preference service). This will save you 1.75 a month and reduce your junk phone calls.
Now that we have told everyone to use 1899 to ring us in the states at 3p per call, they've only gone and increased the price to .5p per minute. Still a good bargain but does make it a bit more expensive than it used to.
you can actually ring tv licencing on a freephone number, 0800 3282020 which isn't advertised on their website. Useful when cancelling the licence as why pay yet more money on a national rate (0870 241 6468) phone call when you can do it for free.
I've talked about 1899 and 18866 before and I'm even more convinced they are the same company - they even both have "(NEW SERVER)" in the title of their web page. Anyway, 1899 is slightly cheaper than 18866 although you pay more on a per connection basis, 3p as opposed to 1p, but the calls are cheaper - free to US, Canada and UK landlines.
However, 1899 also has Voice Over IP at the same rates so you can actually use it whilst connected to broadband to ring other people in the uk for just 3p on their home number. This would work out cheaper than skype but the same price as using your home number. This does mean that you can use this anywhere in the world and get cheap phone calls though - so in theory I could ring a US phone number from the states, long distance, for 1p......Might even be worth installing this on the parents-in-law pc so they could ring me for 3p.
Incidentally, the funny thing is that you can also ring your home phone number at the same time and caller ID shows it as your home phone number ringing.
and thats it...you pay 3p to call a LANDLINE in the states (or the uk) and nothing else per call.This international phone call business is getting really cut throat (and hard to remember which company to prefix with)
We just got an orange sim for £1.99 plus £1.75 p&p to allow us to take advantage of Orange Wednesday where you get one ticket free to the cinema on a wednesday when you purchase one. The sim arrived today but thats when we discovered Kristen's phone was locked to vodaphone. Thanks to unlock nokia its not anymore! Unfortunately Kristen is out on wednesday night this week so we won't be going this week.
Now that call18866 has put their prices up for calling the states to 2p a minute, I've been on the lookout for a better deal - and thats call1899. Their charges are .5p per minute to the states, free for uk landline calls but with a connection charge of 3p (as opposed to 18866's 1p connection charge)
We used call18866 to the states this weekend and they've put their call charges up to 2p/min!
well the guys at 18866 are now doing free calls to uk landline numbers at any time - you only pay a 1p connection charge. sounds great!
Finally figured out a way to get my Nokia mobile synched with outlook 2003. As Outlook normally runs in cached mode, the nokia software keeps prompting me for a password when it synchs (and it doesn't have a password). However, by setting a profile up on the machine to be online all the time and then telling nokia pc sync to use this profile, it doesn't prompt me and everything synchs. I do still get the "this program is trying to use outlook - do you wish to allow it" prompt but this is bypassed using ClickYes
The good thing about not being able to make any calls since Monday is that our phone bill will be substantially cheaper. The bad news is that the mobile bill will be substantially higher. We're still without dial out access from home, but can receive calls. BT's automated "looseyouinaqueueofbuttonpressinguselessness"(TM) phone system is currently stating a fix time of 68 hours. Add that to the 36 hours and we're hopefully looking at a nice lot of line rental rebate.
I was suprised to see on the Guardian's blog that AT&T users can now send sms texts to European mobile users. I thought that as sms's were just texts to numbers, that they were therefore global and they could already send us texts. I'll have to see if my Brother In Law can send us texts...
I've started to see quite a lot of press about Skype and did wonder how they were going to make their money as their plan to offer free voice calls to other skype users seemed to be a great idea but bound to crash under the volume. However, The Register reports that Skype are likely to charge for premium services. Not sure what these would be. I don't know anyone who uses Skype - hands up anyone?
T-Mobile sent me the following email after I complained that I had been hung up on after querying my final phone bill after cancelling the contract due to them increasing the costs.......
>Thank you for your email about your pay as you go package.
Pay as you go? I was on a contract
>As a connection action was not made within 180 days, your mobile number >was suspended and entered a 90 day hibernation period. Examples of a >connection action are:
>1. Crediting your account
>2. Sending a text message
>3. Making a chargeable call
It wasn't suspended as I was making and receiving calls and you've billed me for them which is why I am complaining!
>During the hibernation period you were unable to make and receive calls or >access voicemail.However, you could still call Customer Services on 150.
You can't call customer services when tmobile cancel the sim card!
>Your mobile number could have been reconnected within the 90 days for a >charge of £10.00. As the 90 days has now passed and the line has not been >reconnected, it has been permanently cancelled meaning any credit remaining >on the account will be lost.
I hope they haven't cancelled my £150 owing on my contract!
My reply is in the extended entry...will be interesting to see if I get a reply.
T-mobile sent me a letter with the latest bill saying that they were going to charge £1 a month for itemised billing which had previously been free. The bottom of the letter mentioned that this "represents an increase in our charges above the retail price index figures". What they don't tell you is that this means you can quite legitimately (although not hassle free) cancel your agreement with them under their own terms and conditions. I've tried ringing customer services up who insist they'd charge me up until september and suprise suprise there is no manager available to speak to. They did say they'd ring back before 10pm tonight though but I'm not holding my breath. An interesting forum discussion has evolved at Money SavingExpert on this problem.
Finally got my cheque from FWDCellular for my years rent on the T-Mobile sim that I purchased for them. The deal was(and is) that I paid the first years rental up front and after the first bill they sent me a cheque within 28 days....or so it should have been. After almost two months I sent them a snotty letter threatening them with the small claims/trading standards/credit card clawback if they did not pay by the end of the week (tomorrow). Today the cheque arrived, but either them or T-mobile have been a bit sneaky. It looks like T-Mobile bill from the 21st of the month and my phone was activated on the 23rd. Therefore I get billed for the period from 23rd to the 21st then the period for a year. Needless to say I only get the cash back for the year's period....so I'm out by ten quid :-(
I wouldn't have thought that organising an adsl modem to work in conjunction with a hardware firewall would be that difficult. But I've been receiving conflicting advise over what routers/functionality needs to be installed. All I need is an router/modem that is effectively invisible to the firewall so it thinks it is connected to the internet and can get on with its filtering,vpn's and protection. However I am being ignored by BT, the company we are probably going to buy Broadband from (yet another reason to not use them - if they are this bad when we *want* to spend some money with them I hate to think what they will be like when we have a problem), our existing firewall support won't help unless we buy one particular make of router and get broadband from one particular supplier, and the firewall company won't help as they say its the resellers problem - so back to square one.....Almost makes me want to go to dialup modem! The fact that we can't order broadband until the physical line is installed and live also makes a mockery of the whole broadband ordering process.
