Hey All,
I just caught wind from multiple support reps of ours that AT&T is now demanding payment to get an RFO. As in, our folks are calling up AT&T to see why a particular tail circuit was down for whatever period of time and has since come back up with no clear utility power issue or backhoe fade to explain it. The response they get is that an RFO is billable and they have been asked to accept the charge to proceed (which they have rightly rejected thus far). This is the first time I’ve heard of this happening with any of our last-mile transport providers.
I’m very curious, has anyone else experienced this lately with AT&T or any other carriers?
Yes we have seen that response in the past on RFOs. Most of these random outages are maintenance for moving fiber due to construction and they do not tell you when it is going to happen, we have been complaining about this for the past year to them. Every other carrier issues a maintenance notification (most of the time), for some reason they do not feel it is necessary and blame the ASE product.
We are now a gold status customers so the support has gotten better. We are 2 months into it so we will see long term how it will work out.
Dealing with them has been frustrating for sure…
Well, I guess it’s nice to know we’re not the only ones getting that treatment. I’ll have to see about this “gold status” you speak of.
I wonder how this fits in with AT&T’s SLA commitments? How can you audit your SLA without the RFOs?
-mel beckman
Hi Victor, I was curious about this, so I did a Google search, and found this AT&T RFO PDF:
http://attnocpr.com/custportal/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ATT-PR-NOC-RFO.pdf
While it does not specifically talk to your cost question, it does define a simple procedure to request RFO via email, and one would presume there is no cost, since none specified.