AT&T vs MCI on Network Outages

James Ensor writes " Cnn.com is running an interesting article comparing MCI Worldlnet's recent frame relay outage to an outage that AT&T had last year, comparing their method's of handling the situation. Good Reading. " It's fun to watch major corporations blunder about. Unless it's your connection that's down.

Comments

I knew I'd read about my employeer here some day.

[AtariDatacenter]

It finally happened. I knew one day I'd browse on over to Slashdot and find a naughty story about the company I work for. Well, I can't say they weren't asking for it.

Yeah, the point about all the companies within MCI Worldcom rings true. Like the MCI local network, MCI long distance network, Worldcom long distnace network, and the Worldcom local network (which is actually the MFS local network and the Brooks fiber local network). Then you've got a layer on top of that, like UUNet. Not all that straightforward. They are working on these issues, though.

Responsibility issues? They are there. You should see the hoops I have to go through just to get someone in the same building to investigate a problem within our own LAN. MCI highly emphasises "the procedure".

But the story that Slashdot should be covering isn't the frame network outage. It is MCI's agreement to sell off their IT department to EDS. Most everyone assumed it has gone through. Guess what? They made the announcement 6+ months ago, and the deal (along with IT) is hanging in limbo.

Will we work for EDS? MCI? Do we get our current stock options? Benefits? Policies? Management is saying absolutely nothing. Rumors are flying that the negotiations are going bad and neither side wants to walk away because of a hefty $$ penalty. Even an arbitrator hasn't helped. (That's right, an arbitrator just to reach an agreement. Heaven help both sides over the next five years.)

The entire IT department of a major corporation that can't even say what conditions they will be working under next month. How smart is that?

The main problem is that EDS is a very bad fit for a company like MCI Worldcom. EDS is great for an organization that is low-growth, low-innovation, and reliability situations aren't critical. Say, a local government. But a phone company? Oh boy.

I can't say I know an employee that is enthusiastic about the merger. The only management that claims to love the idea is from the VP level and up.

I've used both and the winner is....

[CodeMonky]

AT&T. We were using MCI for our T1 services and it seemed like everyweek they had some router in Atlanta that was on fire, had grown legs and walked off or had been somehow run over by a bus. Honest to god. They said a bus hit their relay station. We have been using AT&T now for almost 5 months and haven't had a hiccup, they aren't the fastest to get out here and install the stuff but they definately have the better of the two services.

I never liked MCI

[jfunk]

They have a "just enough" attitude to their services. Just give your customers as little as possible and continue to overcharge them. Outages are one thing, how come they refuse to upgrade overloaded networks?

Putting blame on others is also quite common.

I get that impression from many American companies. An embedded company called TERN gave me similar BS at a previous job.

Their development tools were antiquated, the board was defective and they refused to replace it. Transferring new code kept giving CRC errors, and sometimes it would get through, but with errors. They gave me a similar runaround, claiming that all of our computers, including my Dell Dimension XPS 200, had "nonstandard" serial ports that couldn't keep up with 57.6k. Yeah right.

I finally got to the "CEO" (small company) who told me that GM had the very same problem with 100 different new computers, and that all of those computers were bad.

Yeah, right.

We hauled the boards out of both of the projects we were working on and replaced them with cool, reliable ZWorld boards.

Development time shrunk immensely, and reliability was great. Their tech support was also extremely good, they would email me code snippets and everything. They also encouraged messing around with their libraries, I thought that was excellent and found them well written and easy to hack.

Hmmm... Parallels the referenced article quite well. Goes to show, if you're not satisfied, walk. It makes all the difference.

I was suprised

[asad]

AT&T's way is defintely the way a company should handle problems and you know that next time AT&T will be able to solve the problem quickly. No one likes to be blamed for a problem and blaming someone that you are in buisness with will only alienate them from. Unfortunately I have encounted too many companies with this attitude here in the valley and I was very suprised. After a while it became clear to me that in most companies blame needs to go to someone and woe to the person who gets up and says "sorry that was my fault I f%@ed up". You either get fired or get a bad performance review because no one around you admits to any wrongdoing then you must be only incompentant monkey working there.
just my 0.02$

Honesty pays

[MAXOMENOS]

One thing that this article points out, indirectly, is that honesty and responsibility pay. AT&T, by taking its share of the blame and being open about its problems, probably gained quite a few customers; MCI, by keeping quiet and shrugging off the blame, looks like it could lose some major clients.

We can draw a lesson from this. Most of the source of anger against Microsoft is the fact that they close the ranks and engage in finger-pointing when there's a problem, and attack the competition with FUD instead of concentrating on a better product. The Linux world, which is for the most part inherently honest (thanks to the Open Source paradigm), earns the reputation of a better product.

Another lesson to draw from this: it is better to be open about the strengths and weaknesses of Linux than to just plain Microsoft bash. But then again, this is already in the Linux Advocacy HOWTO.

Just goes to prove my theory

[Matthew Weigel]

This sort of thing just makes me feel better about trusting the big bad former monopolies with their specialties :)

Just goes to show one reason why AT&T and IBM have stuck around this long after having their monopolies broken up -- they realized that they could no longer compete with the same old "kill the competition" practices, and went ahead and started providing service. Of course, I also like IBM and (what used to be Bell Labs) Lucent for their significant outlay for R&D. That sort of thing can't be over-estimated in the value it gives a company that can afford it.

What is the meaning of this ramble? Not much, except to maybe provide some food for thought towards what Microsoft might be like it gets its ass kicked by the DoJ :)