I’ve been working in the ISP industry for some years now. During the past six years, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with a couple of Telcos, and am well experienced with the argument “it’s not our problem” when in fact, yes it is your problem and would you please damn well fix it. I’m accustomed to dealing with Telcos who at the very best mislead you, and tell you they’ve someone working on it, when in fact their definition of working on it appears to be “we’re trying to find the ticket”.
So let me apologise to Colt. Recently we moved to the new INEX location, and ordered a ten meg circuit from them. We plugged the circuit in, and it got very tempermental. In fact the problem was narrowed down to the A end seeing what the B end was sending it, but the B end couldn’t see what the A end was sending (yes, this constitutes a problem in my book). So I ask Colt to have a look at the circuit. They test it “everything’s okay”. Now I’m accustomed to hearing this from certain other $TELCOs when the circuit was working fine, stopped working and then eventually had them admit “oh yeah – we put something wrong there”. So I take none of this – have another look. Ring Colt. Colt send engineers. Hmmm… still not working. Play with it a bit more – make more discoveries. Colt agree to send out an engineer again – but want me onsite (fair enough). Talk to engineer at B end – have him test the presentation point – everything’s okay. Have him test to wear the connection is going into the router…. Aha! We have a problem.
Turns out you see the problem is actually on the patch panel. So its not Colt’s fault. So apologies to Colt for judging them by the same low standards as certain other telcos (not that I’m naming names or anything), and thanks for your patience. INEX traffic working beautifully once more.