TelcoRev.eu - A guide to shitty telcos

An Introduction

Telecommunications providers (telcos) are experts in providing a range of communications channels to interlink computers, routers, ATMs, telephones and just about anything that knows how to talk IP (and many things that don't). I say they're experts, what I mean is that they win business on the basis that they are able to complete a comms link as ordered.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be fiction.
I've genuinely lost count of the number of times that I've had to be overly involved in the delivery of a circuit in the form of a private wire, or a leased line if you prefer.
The ineptitude is exacerbated as a telco size increases. Layers of management that think ITIL is the answer to all life's problems and are focussed on KPIs and metrics more than they are actually delivering a good service for their paying customers.
Every role is designed to confuse the hell out of everyone involved.
"Sales executives" who peddle the wares and hand off your meticulously completed order form to one of the "order managers" who take your order and randomly omit or typo crucial detail when kicking off the next task dictated by their workflow.
"Field engineers" who on the whole are a good bunch of smart guys, disgruntled by the ridiculous procedures and handcuffs of the companies they work for.
"Customer service executives" kinda glue together all of the bits that none of the other folks seem prepared to do. It's a shame that this falls to these people because they'd be hard-pressed to find someone who could fuck this up worse.
"Account managers" who are commonly your sales executives too. They're generally the people that should be your single point of contact for escalations and anything more complex than the simple tasks their call centre staff or website can help with. Problem is, the smaller you are as a customer, the smaller the bite at the account manager you get and the less effective they are for you.
If your telco is, as many are, having to subcontract parts of the circuit they're going to provide to you by using third parties to provide international and local access portions, you don't even have the luxury of seeing into the hell that is inter-telco communication. You must simply accept the consequences of their compound stupidity.

Telco Reveu

AboveNet Communications

Actually a pretty excellent telco. They provide high-bandwidth fibre-based leased lines and dark fibre services in metro areas and internationally.

AT&T

Generally pretty good. I've only dealt with AT&T in a large company who had a high value relationship and most of the problems encountered were due to unavoidable under-sea cable faults or natural disasters.

Batelco

Awful response times, prices and inter-telco service levels. Actually I dealt with them via AT&T and they were the only third party telco (unavoidable due to State-run monopoly) that had to be specifically discussed as a cause of problems.

BT

So many companies under one name. And they're all terrible. None of them talk to each other in a useful manner because the anti-monopoly break-up that was forced results in all of the necessary teams being spread across multiple legal entities separated by strict interaction policies. No queue-jumping, etc.

Cable & Wireless (incl. THUS)

I'd always found them to be a pretty reliable telco until a recent circuit order went to shit because of an incompetent Order Manager.

COLT

The universally worst telco I've ever dealt with. Fails on every single level except pricing: ever hear "you get what you pay for"?

Global Crossing

Pretty sure they've been acquired by Level3 now, but I dealt with them when they were solo. Once things were set up, they rarely went wrong. However getting things set up correctly proved exceedingly difficult, and their account managers were inept.

Level3 Communications

Surprisingly easy to get hold of an engineer and work through issues, however some negative experiences with some long-running issues that were due to failed hardware. Their hosting arm is a different story. Account management is pretty poor too.

Tata

Again, only dealt with them as a third party supplier via another telco, but they generally have pretty poor response times and inter-telco communication processes.

Verizon Business

Oh my, what a biscuit-taker. A company who by their own admission employ people who can't be trusted to accurately report the state of affairs with an outage-related incident have a wicked streak of uselessness throughout their ranks. Appalling customer service. Though I will grant that one of the outages we reported to them was resolved by the third party we use for remote management of a colocation plugging a power cable back in after knocking it out the previous day, and VzB didn't call us idiots to our faces - I was quite surprised, actually.

Virgin Media

Generally pain-free experiences, but not high importance services.