What are IT Geeks doin in the telcom business 25

[firefoxfire]

I am wondering what everyones experience is with these IT geeks that think they belong in the telcom business simply because they can plug an IP or VOIP telephone set into a router.

I keep hearing complaints from people all over the place that they are promised the world from these guys and they get nothing but excuses from lost and poor connections to system and networks that are continually off line.

I hear that the features and services are never correctly configured and that training is very poor or the customer is just given a manual or directed to a web site for help.

These guys are just not telephone people and have no idea how proper cable management works let alone the proper needs of the customers.

They introduce and install equipment that is overwhelming to the customers and their employees with to many features and complicated menus to work with etc.. They are trying to force a telephone to do the work of a computer or Laptop.

And the attitude I get from these guys is usually paranoid, unreliable and uncooperative to say the least.

What is your experience with these guys getting into the telcom business?

Thanks

 

[Oldtimephoneguy]

Consultants are another issue too. Some (few) are knowledgeable, honest and sincere. I started doing "IT" work long before it was called IT and have seen too many Bozo's calling themselves consultants who generally can't hold a job in this business due to being inept in one way or another. But they have the "gift". They arrive pull the wool over the bosses eyes and tricked them into thinking they know what they are talking about. Too often these "in"sultants are working behind the scenes with suppliers and which ever supplier nets them the most profit is the technology they'll recommend. As stated above there are some consultants who do justice and the majority of the rest give these few good ones a bad name.

Frank. City of Cape Coral, Florida

 

[jplissonneau]

Congratulations Sir you got post #100

Heh. I had to fix things after one of those did a wireless "site survey", called his "tech" guy on the phone, described him what he saw on the field, and ended up:
- recommanding only three wireless bridges units for two point-to-point links (one of them being the "root" bridge for two links)
- choosing three identical somewhat directional access points, even though the root bridge was in the center of a pretty wide angle
- not having a lot of margin with the range of these access points in the first place
- not considering the fact that there were quite a few nice, healthy trees right on the line of sight of both remote sites. Being able to see through the trees in winter is not "clear line of sight".

Made it work (the customer had to install poles away from the trees that further widened the angle), though that project was dangerously close to being a disaster.


--
A(PS|CI)S-SMEC
IT consultant
Canada / Quebec City area

 

[Oldtimephoneguy]

And how about when the powers that be are entertaining some consultants or salespersons and doesn't include other people in the department that know the operation in their ideas, meetings or purchase. And then it's known that their "solution" won't work because the boss doesn't know what we have, how or why it works. It's nice when the powers get everyone together to decide on what we need. I wish I had a dollar for everytime the people that know are invited to talk to the consultant and the consultant can't answer the real questions and discuss the other options that can be done. The loud noise of that consultant's bubble bursting is quite loud and oh, the dirty looks you get. Recently we needed a new SMDR system. The people that have experience working with SMDR and will be maintaining it wasn't included in the purchase and as you might guess, it's not a good fit for us. But then it's our job to make it fit and the others will never admit they coulda, woulda and shoulda. I always like references of other users and in our case I would want to talk to someone who has an NEC voice network (with other NEC's connected to a 2400) with Cisco Call Mangler added in. The vendor cannot explain or fix the hundreds (and growing) number of ficticious extensions pumping out calls. They like to blame the Cisco and NEC systems instead. Like the old saying goes, THEY WILL NOT LET ME DRIVE THE TRAIN, I CANNOT RING THE BELL. BUT LET THE TRAIN JUMP OFF HE TRACK AND SE WHO CATCHES H*LL.

Frank. City of Cape Coral, Florida

 

[Dexman]

IP ATAs can be (and are often) used to connect analog data equipment. They requires G.711, enough initial buffering (that increases latency) and QoS end-to-end to work reliably though.

This adds more complexity to a system. With POTs you have a plug & play simplicity. No muss no fuss. No QoS, buffering or other parameters that IP networks have to deal with.

Going with a managed service is great but it costs money in the form of high bandwidth pipes and the service itself. Mom & pop and single point operations that have basic DSL service cannot afford this level. For them, IP service is Vonage, Packet8 or some similar company that relies on a public Internet connection rather than a dedicated pipe.

Redundancy for them is POTs lines. With POTs line if power is lost, simply grab some SLTs, plug them in at the demarc and you're back in business. With IP service...good luck even if you have UPSs connected to your equipment.

This topic is getting a bit long in the tooth. So I'm going to wrap my part up by stating that IP does have a place in modern communications, but it is being packaged & sold as a "be all/end all" which it is not.

I "FEATURE 00

 

[jplissonneau]

IP telephony doesn't make copper POTS and TDM systems totally irrelevant yet (or in the near future), but this will happen at some point with the help of cable companies, FTTH, wireless providers etc. My guess is that it will take decades for POTS subscriber lines to go below a significant market share, but that it will happen much sooner for TDM trunks and PBXes.

Now, as with everything, being an early adopter means taking risks and VoIP had (and still has) its share of problems. But it is becoming mainstream.

Some casual ISPs have already been offering telephony services using SIP ATAs over their DSL service (dry loop) for a few years. The ATA is also the router, manages the QoS, and the customer doesn't have acces to the configuration so it's as plug-and-play as it can get.

Cable telephony modems are actually IP ATAs. They work perfectly as the cable company manages QoS end-to-end, and they have a built-in backup battery. It looks exactly like POTS to the customer.

As of redundancy even my grandmother has a cell phone because we can't trust the POTS line where she lives. Every other year it gets struck down by storms and it takes days for the local phone company to repair.


--
A(PS|CI)S-SMEC
IT consultant
Canada / Quebec City area

 

[hairlessupportmonkey]

oh and im skilled in splicecom (nothing to boast about), NEC xn120 and alcatel omnipcx

and i do an excellent job on them all, as well as build all the servers that may accompany them

ACSS - SME
General Geek

 

[swfl]

I worked for a company that installed and maintained Nortel phone switches for a large high end home building company out of Lee county, FL who made the decision to replace everything with Cisco equipment. After trashing all the Nortel equipment from many sites all over South Florida, the only difference I saw was an overly complicated phone system for the IT dept. and the end users alike that cost an arm and a leg. Unfortunately there was no ROI since the big housing bust came shortly after.

 

[firefoxfire]

Here is a good one from this week.

I heard thru the grape view at Cox this week that the IT Guy at a 15 store liquor retail outlet had all 15 stores cutover from Century Link to Cox this week all on the same day.

It turned into a disaster as you could expect because each store was not ready for the cut.

Did I mention that this is in Las Vegas a 24/7 drinking town and that this was on Friday.

Oh did I forgot, that the IT guy who arranged this is on vacation.

 

[swfl]

It wasn't just a plug and play cut-over?

Run Forrest run!

 

[Westi]

Well I guess there is a job opening now.
Who can be that stupid to cut over 15 stores at the same time? Would he change all servers over at the same time? No big loss to the company when he gets canned.

Joe W.

FHandw, ACSS

Google it you damn kids

 

[hawks]

And the icing on the cake is he took vacation during the cut over. Anyone want to move to Vegas?

 

[NewNic]

Ahhh...I remember the good ol days of analog...ops..hybrid..ops...digital...ops...H323...ops...Sip

Just wait....your next job will be BYOM....Bring your own moblity.

Hire some kid right outa school...make him a cube rat. Hes going to look on his desk and see that huge phone and say...wtf is that? i cant use my moble?

30 yrs in voice. Embrace the new ways and have fun with it

 

[crumthwacket]

That's dead on Perv2 - have a star.

Sometimes old guys think too much - younger guys tend to jump all over problems and don't worry about consequences; but I enjoy being around the younger bunch.

 

[ddimitrie]

Don't get me started - I started working full-time in 1979 for Burroughs - mainframe computers - in technical support - in 1994 I made the jump to telecomm, quite by accident - the guys in the Property department retired and the powers-that-be thought, hey, you know, cabling for voice and data are converging, gee, maybe we should give this to the IT dept. It only takes about a day each quarter to handle the phone stuff - pay some bills, do interdepartmental chargebacks --- yea, right ---

my life was much easier before the IT people (see, I don't consider myself IT anymore) got involved in telecomm - now instead of me dealing with things, we have committees that sit around and discuss the heck out of this. We've been working on putting in a phone system for about 70 people for 2-3 years now - it's all about process - someone outside of the process pointed out about 2 years into this that no one had even done a site visit to see what their needs were - it had all been done thru meetings and emails and phone calls by non-telecomm people talking to management at the location.
Then there's the IP world - our phone network was pretty chaotic for about 3 days recently - why, because some nitwit in the basement plugged in a hub on their desktop, then plugged the hub twice into the network (because he had 2 computers ......)
ARGH!
Darlene

p.s. does anyone know how to change my category - I put MIS years ago and want to change it

 

[Sympology]

Then there's the IP world - our phone network was pretty chaotic for about 3 days recently - why, because some nitwit in the basement plugged in a hub on their desktop, then plugged the hub twice into the network (because he had 2 computers ......)

So you deal with crap management and crap network staff. These are not IT people, they are idiots. Plugging a hub into two networks should not be an issue on a properly configured network.
Decent IT guys + decent network = Decent VoIP.

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

http://alvechurchlounge.org.uk

 

[IPGuru]

Decent IT guys + decent network = Decent VoIP.

This sums it all up
large organisations usually have a dedicated IT team with the required skills.

The small and medium companies tend to have either no IT or only basic IT skills & cant understand that this is not enough for a full VoIP solution ('our computers work fine so why the problem')

At least when the Voice & Data networks are kept separated there are no difficulties in defining who is responsible for a problem.



I do not Have A.D.D. im just easily, Hey look a Squirrel!

 

[leoingle]

I am one of these IT Geeks and I am looking to jump ship into the telcom world. I dont have a good knowledge of telcom right now, but I have more than most of the IT guys I work work with. Can anybody point me in a direction for some study guides, publications or whatever to give me a good base knowledge of telcom, so that I am not one of these guys ya'll are talking about?

 

[SYQUEST]

Learn telephony history...


....JIM....

 

[Oldtimephoneguy]

Good day! It probably would be best to partner with someone doing phones for a long time. It's not as much rocket science as the "Cisco" world but there is a learning curve. The basics are really good to know especially when it comes to what works best for the customer and what you can do to make their job easier. Whatever you do don't look down your nose at the guy who knows the basics because you'll get nowhere. And don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, jump in and brown nose this guy too. I only know a few guys who really know the basics and what telephony is all about and they know Cisco too (not me). Beleive me, these guys are on their way!
Good luck!

Frank. City of Cape Coral, Florida

 

[swfl]

How are things going in Cape Coral, Frank? I had to move from Ft. Myers Beach to Pittsburgh because of the hit we took from the housing mess. I hope things are picking up there. Gets too damn cold up here for a Florida boy.