BT lines – does anyone care any more?

You might think this article is about the rise and rise of mobile but you’d be wrong.  It’s a simple tale of a customer wishing to save money by reducing the number of lines they have coming into the building.

We were asked about the implications for their phone system if the lines were changed from ISDN30 to ISDN2 back in August 2012. We recommended, as they were a software house, with large broadband capacity a simple move to SIP trunks which could have been done quite quickly and migrated all of their existing Direct Dials (DDI’s). Bearing in mind their system was 9 years old they were also thinking they may have had to change the system which would’ve kind of defeated the object of saving money. However, as the system was a Splicecom maximiser a simple free software upgrade was all that was required.

In October we were advised that they were having the lines changed over by BT Local Business. In February, some 4 months later we received notification that BT were ready to change over the lines so we arranged an engineer to visit site to upgrade the system and programme it accordingly. This all went smoothly and was left awaiting the completion of the changeover. A couple of days later we were advised by the customer that there was a fault with the system as calls were not getting through. This was investigated and to our horror we found, after sitting on the phone for 45 minutes that BT had not completed the work and all calls to the DDI’s could not be delivered. This necessitated a small temporary programme change to ensure that the customer was receiving all calls to their site.

But it got worse. We then found out that there were underground problems which was delaying the delivery of the DDI’s and even though BT Local were telling the customer the installation was complete it was in fact far from complete. We had further discussions with the specialist BT ISDN team who, to their credit, did eventually advise when the job was complete. This was some 6 weeks after our initial visit. And you’d think that would be the end of it but oh no.

When the DDI’s were eventually delivered the customer found they had a new set of DDI’s which meant that all their employees contact details had changed. Furthermore the phone system had to be reprogrammed again with the new numbers. Fine at last you think. Oh no.

A week later the customer calls to say that their fax machine is not working and thinks again that there is a problem with the phone system. W advise him that the call to the fax machine is not being delivered and to check with BT. Behold, this number has dropped off the system as a Single Number DDI and BT have to reset it. As they had previously changed the delivery configuration on the ISDN from 4 to 6 digits there was a small programming change required on the system before the fax would work.

Finally, the changeover had been completed.

Like a lot of things in life complex solutions have been simplified and we take them for granted. Delivering a call over a copper wire to the correct person through a corporate phone system is a complex problem. When executed incorrectly you end up with problems that are challenging, time consuming and costly.