The AT&T Phone System Is Third World.

[robby]

The first rain of the season and the main phone line goes dead. This was happening last year, and they told me that they had located and fixed this problem. The AT&T automated service essentially won't take a failure report unless I authorize a $85 charge if they decide it's my inside wiring, which it is not and never has been. I finally pushed the AT%T envelope and found a live human that agrees the line is bad, forwarded the calls from the main number to another line that still works and will have everything fixed by Monday.

Comments

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Excellent. Mechanized Loop Testing. The only thing their stupid dispatch guys do, anyway, is sit there at the block, call the 'frame and are told, "give me a ground; give me a short." Which you do with a screwdriver. Telephony's easy. The trouble's always outside anyway, outside is where it rains and poles get hit by trucks and cables get cut by backhoes. How often does anything happen to your inside wire? --almost never. Unless your kid chews on it or something.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[hughknox.livejournal.com]

i cant tell you how many complaints i've heard about cutomers buying a "service", for instance, adding call waiting or whatever, and when they get their bill they discover they have purchased SEVERAL services and must go through hell to get them removed.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is because the services are "vertical," that is, conceptual feature additions to a customer's POTS service. They're just software configurations in a mainframe.

The problem arises because Call Forwarding Busy, Call Forwarding Don't Answer and Call Forwaring Busy Line/Don't Answer are sold as a package with Voice Messaging Service for obvious reasons -- this is an example -- and that setup by analogy extends to Repeat Dial, Call Waiting, Call Repeat, Speed Call 8, Speed Call 15, etc., they are all most commonly sold in packages not a la carte. Which is why the service order system tends to fuck up when someone orders an individual service & it then installs multiple services. There is a service order charge (around $35) when the company admits a fuckup and has to issue a SECOND service order to fix the screwed-up first one. They have to eat that. They don't like doing that, so instead they'll try to pretend those additional services are the customer's fault. It's evil not so much by intention as by failure. Btw, all us product managers agreed by 1996 all the vertical services should be given away free on customers' lines (to increase landline sales) but the public utility commissions won't allow it. It IS allowed with cellphone companies because they are Not Regulated. Landline regulations date from the 20s & 30s.

If it's not obvious, I product managed every single one of the vertical services. They are very handy but misapplied (obviously) and the stupid local telcos should be deregulated yesterday because cellphones are going to make them irrelevant anyway by 2010.