We’ve all created and exchanged Excel workbooks with colleagues, coworkers and business partners at one time or another. The act is not always as useful as we might hope. By paying attention to simple details you greatly improve the chances that your message will be heard and that the ensuing discussion focuses on that message. [...]
Frequently contracts for adding products, services and for changing service providers must be processed. The ability to read, understand and negotiate such contracts is essential to becoming an effective manager.
First, it is absolutely necessary to become comfortable reading contracts and understanding their meaning. Certainly contract language is not the same as that which one might [...]
We recently began using what we call an SMS Push application. SMS Push allows us to send Text Messages to our subscribers in bulk. Typically these messages are some Marketing promotion or a Customer Service announcement.  The message text and a list of MDNs is provided to the application and it sends them serially, [...]
All voice network operators are continually looking for ways to cut the cost of delivering outgoing long distance calls. The best way to do this is to use 2 or more Inter-Exchange Carriers (IEC, in FCC-speak) or what you and I might call “long distance service providers,” and cherry pick the cheaper provider for [...]
Starting late last year our long-distance network has been overwhelmed with calls to various for-free services. These services often appear to be the proverbial free lunch, with no apparent business model because the service is 100% free to the end user. Typical offerings include free conference calls or voice chat rooms. These [...]
A good part of the last couple days has been spent looking for missing call waiting tones. Call waiting tones are the soft background beeps that usually are heard when you are talking on the phone and someone else tries to call your phone. The sound you’ll typically hear is a double beep [...]
During last night’s maintenance window our Packet-Voice Gateways (PVG) were upgraded as part of our preparation to upgrade the entire cellular switch to the latest version of software, MTX14. Preparations have been underway for several weeks, leading up to what Nortel calls the One Night Process (ONP.) The preparations include component-by-component changes to [...]
Putty is an ssh client for Microsoft Windows which can automate secure logins to remote computers. This tutorial allows you to automate these logins using your public/private key pair.
Putty can be downloaded from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. Download and install the entire putty distribution.
During this procedure the following high-level steps are taken:
First, create a [...]
This became a surprisingly full day. An earthquake near Taiwan around 1 PM local time disrupted communications lines to our out-sourced call center in Manila, the Philippines. This was certainly a surprise to our Customer Care group as they were under the, apparently mistaken, impression that diverse redundant voice routes were provided by the [...]
We’ve started a forum on Teletips Network called Cable Conundrums for sharing pictures of telecoms racks. Our first post doesn’t actually look too bad; though the camera was uncharacteristically kind. In person the racks seem far messier. The pictures show these racks from the front. From behind the cabling looks far [...]
