Down, but not out

While I was out of the office two weeks ago scouring Las Vegas for networking scoops, the real news happened back in New York in the form of a three-day telephone outage at the Intertec bureau office in which I work. In case you weren't reading closely, that was three days.

I'm sure the scenario has been repeated numerous times in corporations worldwide, so I won't go into the gory details. Suffice it to say that incoming voice service shut down at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, and after a lengthy song-and-dance by the suppliers, service was fully restored early Friday morning.

At first, Bell Atlantic (the service provider) and Lucent Technologies (the equipment vendor) performed remote checks of the system, and each blamed the other's infrastructure. Repeated pleas to Bell Atlantic to dispatch an onsite repairperson proved futile until the company realized Intertec was part of a larger corporation, Primedia, whose name carries some clout in Manhattan.

As a result, Bell Atlantic and Lucent each sent reps to a vendor meeting in our offices, and the source of the problem was finally located - at Bell Atlantic's central office.

I'm not picking on Bell Atlantic or trying to get preferential treatment the next time our phone system goes down. My real interest is in the questions the experience raised regarding the long-term viability of wireline voice services, the horrid customer service that accompanies it and the gaping hole of opportunity for competitive and wireless carriers.

My first thought concerns the AT&T MLX-10DP phone on my desk and the network that it's connected to. Why do I need it? I have no doubt that if I'd been in my office, I would have survived the incident intact. Using a combination of my Sprint PCS mobile phone and e-mail, I would have had no problem conducting interviews, setting up appointments and communicating with my editorial colleagues in Chicago.

Contrast that reaction to the experience I had during the daylong attack of the "I Love You" virus three weeks ago. Intertec's corporate e-mail was down for about 24 hours, and frankly, it felt like a snow day. I was tempted to leave the office and work from a bench in Central Park. The phone just didn't feel like a viable substitute for the communicating I needed to do. If the outage had gone on for three days, I might have headed to the Cayman Islands.

Thanks to Intertec's crackerjack IT department, e-mail service was restored the next day, but that brings up another contrast between the legacy telephone network and the Internet: user control. Instead of having to navigate the layers of an ILEC's customer service department and being threatened with statements like, "We can send a technician, but if the problem is not in our equipment it's going to cost you a billion dollars per hour," Intertec handled the virus expeditiously with its in-house staff.

Which makes me think that, surely, corporations don't want to handle every aspect of their telecommunications infrastructure, but many would like more control over their voice networks, and that should present opportunities galore for next generation service providers.

My final thought concerns a phrase constantly repeated by our human resources manager that keeps echoing in my head: "It's Bell Atlantic. They're a monopoly. What can we do?" That suggests to me that the CLECs and ICPs out there, not to mention the IXCs getting into local service, have a lot of mindshare building to do in the enterprise.

As for me, I've come to a wonderful epiphany: Once I get high-speed wireless Internet and e-mail access on my PC, I'll be defenestrating my desk and landline phone. Bell Atlantic, look out below.