When you order a data circuit, do you know who is actually installing the circuit? Do you know who is responsible for it after it is installed?
Recently, Motivity Communications sold a point to point 50 meg circuit from a customer’s site to a data center from a local CLEC. I could not believe the mess that ensued. The CLEC needed the help of many different people/companies to actually get the circuit installed.
AT&T had to bring the wire into the building. This is common as they own the “last mile” of wire/fiber in the Midwest. Century Link had to get involved to provide the connectivity between the two sites. The CLEC was supposed to bring the line up to the customer’s suite, but found it to be too expensive, so Motivity Communications had to find a tech to do that portion and credit the amount toward the customer’s bill. Finally, the data center on the Z end had to cross connect the circuit into a cage in the data center.
After all of this was done the circuit did not work. Who should be responsible here? To me it is the CLEC because all paperwork was signed on their letterhead. When we asked the CLEC for help they kept pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. They claimed it is a problem with the wire coming from AT&T, or with the line coming up from the basement. When those tested out fine, they blamed Century Link and the data center people for a bad circuit/cross connect.
This circle went on for weeks. It was up to Motivity to work with everyone to do the testing. My point was the CLEC needed to track all this down and deliver a clean working circuit. They did nothing! Luckily this circuit was ordered by a law firm who wrote a letter saying, “fix it or we will be cancelling.” Wow, did that get their attention.
They finally sent a tech out to see what was going on (2-3 weeks into the mess). This was the first time one of their techs ever went on site. When the tech arrived, he told the customer he did not understand why he was there as it was not on the CLEC’s network. Great customer service, huh?
The fact of the matter is, CLEC basically shuffled some paperwork around and bought pieces from many different providers, but refused to take responsibility for anything. Since they sold it, they are responsible for A to Z… or birth to death as I like to call it.
Can you imagine if a customer bought this directly from the CLEC? They would have no idea what to do when the CLEC was uncooperative. Once again, we see the value of the agent community. We know how to get involved to make issues like this go away so you the customer can go about your day to day work.
