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 of around 440 Hertz for 300 milliseconds. Well, we lost ours.
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. Read More…
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 hardware, software and firmware. Mostly this has been pretty uneventful, save for the issues caused by us being one of the Verification offices (VO) for Nortel’s then-new Packet MSC. Nortel has dealt with issues as they arose, and the upgrade has only slipped a day or two.
PVG preparation work had been completed according to schedule during the maintenance window by our Nortel installer and a member of the Network Operations staff. The summary of the night’s activities was already sent, network traffic was starting to pick-up, the day shift was sipping the day’s first latté as the night-shift left to go home. Read More…
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 public-private key pair using
puttygen.
- Second, create a session for logging into a particular host. This session will include the IP address, and can include the username and location of your private key
- Lastly, add your public key to the host you’ll be logging into.
Each of these steps is detailed below. Read More…
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 out-source company.
Regardless, it caused the Engineering department some serious headache. As the assumption had been that redundancy was built-in, a business recovery plan had not been created. A scramble was required to cobble together a work-around to reduce the impact on our customers, whose calls in the meantime were being dumped on the floor.
Read More…
TeleTips Network has just opened a new message board for the Nortel EV-DO. There seems much to learn. Nortel has provided a training course which I’ll be following over the next few weeks. I’ll post the course specifics later, and a review of the course materials. In the meantime, this board can be used for your Nortel EV-DO discussions.
The second week of September in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Nortel will be hosting their users for a week-long conference of training, product demonstrations and sales. It is also expected to be a good chance for users to get together, compare notes, swap stories and have some fun. TeleTips Network will be there, blogging from the conference and calling attention to highlights and news. We’ll be showing the flag and recruiting some new members, too. If you’ll be attending drop us a note and look for us there.
Here’s a link to the Nortel CDMA Wireless Users Group Conference
Vodafone and Verizon are again in the news. I’ve posted a recent story to our message boards, and written about them previously in the context of the upcoming American 700 MHz auctions. (Full disclosure: I used to work for AirTouch, which was acquired by Vodafone, and for Arun Sarin, now CEO of Vodafone.) The recent news is about their difficulties getting along together and about the possibility that the dividend Verizon pays to Vodafone, as a major stockholder, might not be paid again until 2010 or later. Read More…
Overnight I implemented a script that dynamically generates the home page. The purpose of this change is to give better visibility to new information and reader contributions. Off to the side you can see sections showing recent entries into our message boards, recent reader comments to our blog , most popular forum topics.
There’s much left to be done. The style sheet for the blog is not 100% synced up with our home page, though that ought to require a relatively modest effort. The far greater challenge will be to extend our look and feel into our message boards. That’s one of the challenges of open source software: reverse-engineering someone else’s style sheet.
Stay tuned, and thanks for being a part of the TeleTips Network.
So today the American Federal Communications Commission decided to make the winner of the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auctions accept terminals and applications from 3rd-parties. This was at the suggestion of Google and others, and is excellent news for American consumers. It likely will lead to more handsets from which to choose and more innovative applications being available more quickly. Probably it also will mark the beginning of the end of the glory days for America’s incumbent mobile operators.
This ruling heralds much more difficult times for America’s coddled mobile operators. Handset choice and the ready access to innovative applications are not what they are known for. These will force them to change their current business models, which is likely to reduce their margins as well as their subscriber numbers. Their good times now have a hard stop.
Read More…
Purpose
The purpose of this Method Of Procedure (MOP) is to add ranges of IP Addresses, called “pools”, to the Starent 16000 PDSN. An IP address from an IP pool is assigned to a subscriber by the PDSN when a data session is initiated.
Procedure
Begin this procedure by creating a backup of the PDSN configuration file. Use the copy command to create a new configuration file.
[local]pdsn1# copy /flash/system.cfg /flash/system.backupfile.cfg <CR>
The file called system.backupfile.cfg is created as a contingency in the event a problem occurs during execution of this method.
Read More…