One of my customers had an 2Meg Kilostream link connecting two sites. This account is managed by one of the many companies BT use to handle their smaller businesses or basically those that BT are not interested in.
Anyway I have a meeting with these guys to confirm support contacts on the hardware etc and they then admit to me that they have not got a clue how to support the equipment and have no knowledge of the routers on the link. (The customer had been paying them support for around 6 years). It turns out that when they received the order for the link they subcontracted the work to another company (unbeknown to the customer).
Sometime in the past this company managing our account decides they know longer wish to use this other company but fail to ask for any details of previous contracts they had installed on their behalf. Now thats clever.
So we decide that perhaps now would be a good time to get the service upgraded and go for a nice 10mb fibre link which will make the remote site an extension of the main network and give us lots more fexibility. So the wheels are set in motion and we are told it should be about 4 weeks to get the service installed.
A surveyor from BT duly arrives and conducts his survey at both sites, declaring that all is good and that the ducts are in place for the cable runs. By the way he didn’t lift one manhole cover to inspect the ducts, I have no reason to question his wisdom. Excellent I say.
About a week later I get a call from the BT planning office to say that BT will be on site in a few days to install the fibre. Wow I thought things are moving a pace.
Damn I should not have said that, BT arrive on site install the internal fibre but cannot connect the external runs because there is no duct present to carry the fibre cable. They will have to arrange for the civils team to install a new duct to the road. A distance of about 100 metres.
Now this customer already had fibre at the premises, but for some reason BT could not find the existing route in so a few days later a team of road diggers turn up and start carving a slice out of the office car park. They install the duct to an existing manhole and a nice little pipe poking out of the ground near the foundations ready to take the new cable.
Back come the BT installers and find that the new little pipe is totally in the wrong position and would not allow for the bend radii of the fibre cable so was of no use. Back come the civils team and relocate the pipe to a new position marked by the BT guys on the previous visit.
So now we are ready. Back come the BT guys and start to terminate the cables. They walk out the the ducting in the road in the estate lift the cover and guess what, the civils guys had left a coil of fibre in the manhole. Apparently they could not route the cable across the road because the duct was full. They had not notified anyone. Sorry say the BT guys but we cannot complete the work until a new duct is installed across the road on the estate. A week later another civils team roll up and install the new ducting so that the fibre can cross the road and begin its journey to the exchange.
In the meantime I get a call from the customer to say their downstairs toilets are backed up and overflowing. (You would not believe the things I do in IT support).
So what happened then. It turns out that the first teams of civils guys had, during the rush to complete the job, crushed the main sewer pipe leading from the downstairs toilets when backing filling the hole for the new duct, thus causing the problem, lovely.
We call out an emergency repair team and good on them they work well into the evening and sort out the issue. We have some nice photos of the underground pipe investigation.
OK, back to the fibre install. We now move on to the other site and yep you guessed it the ducts were full. Thankfully the BT guys could reroute fairly easily, but they had only allowed for running the cable 10 metres to the duct, not the 80 metres they ended up running the cable.
Eventually all was good, the fibre was in the connection made. Our 4 weeks had turned into nearly 10.
It is a wonder I have any hair left.
