Name the workbook suitably

Keep in mind who are the recipients of the workbook.  If it is for intra-company sharing only, use the subject or a project code or anything that clearly associates this file with that group of activities. If you are a vendor sharing with a customer, don’t use the customer’s name as the defining feature.  If you must, use both your company’s name and the customers name, such as “Acme proposal for Jones & son April 2010.xlsx”.  The name should make the file easy to find some time later.

Suitably name each worksheet within the workbook

The worksheet name is used if the file is saved in some other formats, so use this as a way to communicate if that happens. Also, delete any worksheets that have no data. If you don’t, it forces the recipient to check to see if data lurks on each and every unused worksheet you allowed to remain. Do the recipient a favor by deleting them. If you keep several worksheets you can color the tabs for emphasis or to make them more easily identifiable.

Use relevant names for row and column headings

This may seem obvious. But do make a conscious effort to avoid ambiguous or misleading heading names. Remember that the recipient doesn’t yet know everything you know. Give this some thought and choose good names.

Use comments in heading cells

If the heading name is not sufficiently clear, insert a comment into the cell to explain. Describe the source of the data in that column or row. If a formula is in use, explain that. Do what you can to assure that your audience understands and comprehends.

Use Text Boxes or Call-outs for lengthier explanations

The whole point of the workbook is to communicate. To the extent that you force the recipients to figure out your intention, rather than stating it clearly, you open the door for misunderstanding and delay. It’s your responsibility to communicate clearly. Use a text box when a long, verbose explanation would enlighten a tedious point. Describe your approach or analytical methodology. Provide a link to any online data sources or references, such as Wikipedia. Make it hard for the audience to be confused.

Format page headers & footers before printing

If the recipients will be looking at a paper copy, use the Page Setup feature to make a good, descriptive page header, add a date, and to put your email address in the footer. That way everyone will know where to go for updates, clarification and credit! I also like to put “page x of y” in the footer, especially if it is more than a single page.

Assign number formats suitable to the cell value

Take the time to add commas as thousands separators on large numbers, appropriate amount of decimal precision, dollar and percent signs. Your work might not look so much better with them, but it will look distractingly worse without.

Verify page breaks are well-placed

This will ensure that people focus on the content, not on some distracting mid-row or last-column page break. If possible, try to fit all the content on a single-wide page. Use landscape mode rather than portrait mode.

Number each row

This is a convenience that anticipates discussing the workbook in a large setting or via conference call, or if the audience is looking a paper copies. Using a row number is by far the easiest way to focus everyone to the same place in the workbook.

Using these techniques should become part of every workbook you create. If it does, you’ll be doing your audiences and companies a tremendous service.

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 use with friends or family. And it’s hardly typical of many office conversations either. But it is what it is, so just get over it. Many of the commonly used terms and phrases in contract law are the result of years of accumulated court decisions and previous contract experience. These days many contracts are the Frankensteinian products of unbridled copy and paste. (Try comparing your various roaming agreements for similarities.)

Next, in the US there are many commonly used phrases and sections in telecoms contracts with which one should become familiar. And please remember, IANAL.  Consult with your company’s legal team to answer any specific questions.

Force Majeure. Think “act of God.  In other words, things outside of the control of the parties to the contract, or anything reasonably unforeseeable.  This is a get out of jail card for the vendor or service provider, letting them off the hook if the unthinkable happens.

Assignment.  Describes recourse for one party to the contract if the other party gets bought, sold, merged or bankrupted.  Normally notice to the other party must be provided, and if the other party must approve or agree, language such as “such agreement will not be unreasonably withheld”or similar should be included.

Governing Law.  If the parties get in a spat over any aspect of the contract and head to court to resolve the dispute this clause determines the laws under which the case will be heard. If both parties are based in the same state there should be no question.  But if not, a neutral 3rd state is selected, often Delaware as so many companies are incorporated there. We’ve also seen a “home court advantage” clause, which dictates that the party bringing the suit must do so in the jurisdiction of the other party. This tends to act as a disincentive to frivolous lawsuits and encourages the parties to work out their differences between themselves.

Term.This answer the question “how long is this contract is in force?”, and probably includes language for an automatic renewal if no action is taken.  For example, if a T1 is leased on a 3 year term, it will likely automatically renew for another year if not discontinued.  One should be careful of this, though, if plans are in place to discontinue a lease in lease than a year.  In such cases a month-at-a-time auto-renewal would make sense.Breach.  I mention this not because every contract will have a clause so labeled, but because every CEO or senior manager will want to know what are the terms dictating the failure of the other party to perform, or the terms under which the relationship can be ended.  In other words, which actions or inaction constitute breach of contract?

Liquidated Damages.  If a material breach of the contract were to occur, and if costs are imposed upon one party by the other party’s breach or failure to perform then a liquidated damages clause spells out the  penalty imposed upon the offending party.

The above list of commonly used legal clauses is certainly not exhaustive and says nothing about costs, quality and service levels.  Those issues are likely to be more important and much more specific to each individual contract.  Negotiate well, and good luck.

The SMS Push application was provided by Quantum System Integrators in Costa Mesa, CA.  We’ve worked with them on several projects before and they’ve always high quality software and services with excellent customer support.   The application runs on Sun Solaris and is started from the shell command line.  It sends a predetermined messages to each MDN in a list provided as a command-line argument.  The application spawns a single instance of itself and sends the messages .  Through-put has been about 1 message per second, using an SMPP link to our Primal Technologies SMS-C.

To speed the delivery rate we first tweaked the configuration options of the application.  This is a simple messages per second parameter which seemed to have little effect.  We reduced each a bit on each of successive pushes without a noticeable difference.  We even tried decreasing the  value of this parameter thinking possibly it had not been coded properly.  This, too, had no effect and QSI assured us that it had been coded correctly.

Next we asked Primal technologies to investigate the settings on their SMPP link.  They tweaked a bit and then told us that they had configured all of our SMPP links the same.  As through-put on our Inter-Carrier Gateway (ICG) service provider link is sometimes as high as 10 messages per second we knew there was lots of headroom.  We again went back to QSI and they suggested starting several instances of the application at once. We tried this and it worked, up to a point.  We could get 4 instances of the application started and the through-put scaled almost linearly, which is good.  We monitored the SMS message queue and saw no adverse impact, so we thought more instances could be started.  However, with the start of the fifth instance we received a UNIX error message saying the instance received no bind from the SMPP link.

So back to Primal Technologies.  yes, there were several limits in place.  First, this SMPP link was restricted to only 4 instances.  Second, the overall SMS-C could only spawn 16 instances, and most of these were being taken by the ICG link, so allowing the SMPP link used by SMS Push to have more would not matter.  Third and last, there was an overall limit on the number of messages per second the SMS-C could process.  This was a parameter setting and not a hardware limitation.  So Primal Technologies increased the total number of SMPP links available, increased the number accessible to SMS Push, and increased the limit on the number of messages per second.

Happily these steps finally allowed us to message our entire subscriber base in less than 2 hours.  Whether or not this is a Good Thing is an open question.

I should also mention that QSI is building into their application parameters to allow more fine-tuned control of the message delivery rate, so that manually spawning additional application instances will no longer be necessary.

First there is the tyranny of numbers. A Least Cost Routing application typically will use the Local Exchange Routing Guide (LERG) to determine all possible dialed destinations. The LERG defines roughly 450,000 destinations. For each destination you might have a cost proposal from several IEC. We tried evaluating 8 IEC.

So there are several million tests to run simply to derive a single list of the cheapest routes to each possible destination. But this is only the beginning.

Once the list of cheapest routes is compiled, there are several more steps:

• Collapse consecutive destinations served by the same IEC into a single route.
• Interleave “special” routes, such as 411, 611, 911, 976 area codes, specific toll-free destinations, etc. Each of these routes may be dedicated to a particular IEC or service provider. This is necessary when the rules of the switch require routes to be lexically sequential. Our Nortel MTX has such rules.
• Generate a routing file suitable for uploading to your switch from the list of cheap routes

Collapsing consecutive destinations is not difficult, nor is generating a translations file for your switch. Interleaving exceptional routes has proven particularly vexing. There are several conditions that might make this so:

• Individual LERG destinations can be entire NPA-NXX blocks of 10,000 MDN, or they might be NPA-NXX-Y blocks of 1,000 MDN. The code must determine this and adjust as needed.
• If the current exception is lexically less than the next destination then it must be interleaved between destinations.
• If the next destination is a block of 10,000 MDN, then it might be necessary to split it to interleave the current exception.
• There might be several exceptions back-to-back.

Of course the whole exercise could be attempted using Excel. To ably handle any list having 450,000 members Excel 2007 would be required, as it can manage worksheets having 1.2 million rows, and earlier versions maxed out at 65,000 or so rows. I know of one operator that has taken this approach and has found that it does not work well when it works at all. Apparently the high-end PC frequently crashes during runs.

We continue working on our Perl and SQL approach. Our ultimate goal is to have a solution that can be run frequently, perhaps as often as every month. But certainly whenever we get new lower pricing from the IEC.

What we saw initially was increasing traffic volume to destinations that seemed to be rather out-of-the-way, not a destination one would expect to be in our top ten. We use an application called CDR Collection Manager (CCM, which is highly recommend!) from Quantum Systems Integrators that collects all Call Detail Records from our Nortel switch and saves them to a UNIX server in a searchable format. Further Analysis of these CDR showed both high number of calls and extremely long call durations. Searching Google for the called number revealed it to be a free chat room.

We spent several days wondering about these businesses before we saw the light. It wasn’t at first clear to us how they would be making money. No for-fee services were evident on the web site, there were no obvious advertisements that might’ve supported their service. Then my Regulatory Director found this link at the Heartland Institute. The article calls these businesses “traffic pumpers.”

So the business model of the traffic pumpers now becomes clear. The companies offering these services partner with small Local Exchange Carriers (LEC). The LEC are chosen based upon them having an abnormally high access charge. Access charges are fees, laid down in law, which long distance service providers, aka “Inter-Exchange Carriers (IEC), must pay to LEC for the privilege of delivering voice traffic the “last mile”. The traffic pumpers try to stimulate the largest volume of incoming traffic possible to increase the amount of the access charges they collect from the IEC. Clever!

On our side, we have a flat-rate-all-you-can-eat business model. Success in this model depends to a large degree on having a low cost structure, and having subscriber usage which conforms to the “norm.” Extremely high volume callers can distort this model, and these traffic pumper destinations give such subscribers a reason to call.

We’re not entirely certain when we lost it. Looking back, it appears that the first subscriber report may have been received in mid-September. Only recently have the volume of complaints risen to a level that caused anyone to intervene. (There’s probably a process improvement or two lurking within that statement.)
Because call waiting tones are provided by a component of the Nortel switch, we immediately opened a dialog with their Technical Assistance Service (TAS.) Starting yesterday morning several engineers at Nortel TAS with on a conference bridge with several of our Engineers trying to isolate the problem.

But in the meantime the real story is happening elsewhere. Apparently, once enough people became informed and excited about this topic, then everyone became excited about this topic. Is this the 100th Monkey Effect? Some people were asking for hour-by-hour reports, others said send an email to the whole company. C’mon people, it’s call waiting tone, for crying out loud. Some people so easily lose sight of their priorities.

I tell you that I worry that if there is all this drama caused by call waiting tone then I should consider myself damn lucky the most recent OTA outage didn’t last any longer. Where will it end?

Back to the engineers troubleshooting. Let’s talk a bit more about how these tones are created. The sound actually lives as a simple sound file on the hard disk of one of the computers that comprises the Nortel switch. The file gets loaded into memory of the computer and that memory is played whenever requested.

Only it hasn’t been. While troubleshooting we’ve determined that the computer really is trying to play the sound because a subtle change occurs in the background noise when on one call and a second call comes in. So the team did extensive testing to determine where the sound was getting lost.

Late this afternoon they thought they had localized the source of the problem to a possibly corrupted executable or configuration on the gateway controller. Nortel suggested that by switching to an alternate executable the problem would be cleared. They’ll begin testing that theory in a couple hours during the local low-traffic maintenance window.

I written elsewhere about our ongoing migration from MTX13 to MTX14. Although the root cause of this issue with the call waiting tone is yet to be determined, already there is suspicion that an earlier step in the migration process introduced this problem, and that it has gone undetected until now.