After Hours Install of OC3

One of our incumbent LECs (who's initials begin with SBC) botched a
mid-day installation of an additional GIGAMAN drop at our primary DC
earlier this year. Whatever they did, it dropped all of our fiber plant
with SBC. The outages caused were PAINFULL and expensive from an SLA (to
our customers) perspective.

Well, we were in process over the past 3-4 months to get a new Sprint
OC3 installed, and I put a request in for after hours delivery of the
SBC OC3 loop since it will ride the same fiber plant as the previously
botched install. After 2 weeks of arguing amongst themselves, they came
back with a $5100-$10,000 estimate to install the loop after hours. The
loop was previously on a "Free Install" promo with our Sprint agreement,
so I was a bit alarmed at that estimate. Our facilities are already in
place, and we have had lit OC3 drops previously, so no new gear or
strands will be required...

Does anyone else require HICAP loop installs to be after hours? What
experiences have you had (good or bad) with getting the carriers to do
their work during off-peak hours for a reasonable fee?

Thanks,
Robin Greenhagen
GSI

We've done off-hours turnups before, at my previous job with a decent-sized ISP. Some would come back with an off-hours turnup fee which we would turn around beat up our sales rep for, and they would usually reduce or waive it. Most of the fees were pretty low, like $500 or so. $5-$10k seems exorbitant for what amounts to a 'no shutdown', doing some basic acceptance testing and maybe, at the edge of the envelope, turning up a BGP session and testing that, too :slight_smile:

I'd suggest talking to your sales rep to see if the "Free Install" promo extended to off-hours activations, or better yet, beat your sales rep up and see what happens...

We did off-hours turnups for our customers if they requested it.

jms