The Technology Works, But… A Pioneer’s Tale (Cont'd)

The technical infrastructure
Great strides have been made in making VoIP a real carrier grade infrastructure choice. The routers and switches now work routinely as planned. Provisioning, Service Management and Billing systems are available at (almost) reasonable cost, and also work routinely as planned.

As we’ve reported in previous issues of Pipeline, cable providers, traditional telephony providers and pure-play IP providers all have pragmatic choices from a wide variety of network infrastructure and B/OSS vendors. Every provider can now create the physical environments necessary to offer IP-based telephony services almost everywhere across the U.S., and indeed the entire world. That’s the very exciting part.

Thanks to the rock-solid infrastructure components, our small but global company enjoys four-digit dialing between team members in Canada, the U.S., Australia, the UK, and anywhere we travel that has a broadband connection. And in those few places where you can’t find broadband, a cellular phone can be assigned the role of virtual IP Centrex extension. We make good use of unified messaging tools and other collaboration-enabling tools. Our IP Centrex infrastructure has allowed us to dramatically lower our communications costs and increase productivity. Like fax machines and cellular telephones, it is now hard to imagine how we lived without IP Centrex. Having taken its place as a critical business system, there is an accompanying expectation of reliability – not just of the physical services, but of the customer services too. Like what happens when you move to a new address; or when you open a new office in a new geography – one that is not served by the VoIP platform vendor that supports all of your Service Provider’s other locations…

The customer experience
Trial #1 - Moving to a new location
We decided to move to bigger offices in the same building. Pretty straight forward, one would think. We gave our IP telephony provider 90-days notice. After all, it did involve moving the T-1 that we know they re-sell from one of the local incumbents. “No problem – all you have to do is unplug the phones and plug them in again down the hall,” was the reply. We pointed out that the T-1 needed to be moved. “Oh, right. Sorry about that, we’ll get on it.” Then the fun began. Since we were moving down the hall within the same building, we would be served from the same demarcation point. So to the incumbent and to the installation contractor, it didn’t look like a “move” at all. No one wanted to take on the work.

After many phone calls and emails, it was agreed that the incumbent should take the order to move the T-1 termination to our new office. Whew! We focused on all of the other elements of moving, and then waited for the installer to show up. No one came. After many phone calls and emails, it was determined that a due date was never scheduled. Somehow it was left as a “customer to confirm.” Now an expedite fee was required to get the work done within 48 hours. Since we had already moved, that was a definite “yes!” (Thank goodness we have a backup wireless access T-1 – highly recommended.) We agreed to the expedite fee, and waited for three more days. No one turned up. This time, we were told that the installer would arrive within two more days. The circuit works now. All that remains to be resolved is that expedite fee.

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