We have a customer that has a PRI with One Communications as the provider, however, AT&T provides the smart jack. The circuit has been going up and down and they have had calls that just got cutoff in mid-sentence. We have seen errors in the Norstar system but One Communications says that they show no errors or alarms. What would be the reason for our system showing alarms and errors and their logs show it clean during those times?

Thanks

Is it possible you are seeing protocol errors just on the d-channel? Also has the T1 been stress tested yet?

Some of the issues that they are having are that the some of the B Channels go down but apparently the D channel stays up. Sometimes the D channel goes down.

No, the PRI has not been stress tested.

I would start by having the span tested to verify the physical link is good. If so you can start to verify things like protocol and b-channel service messaging

The protocol is OK. What do you mean by B-channel service messaging? I still don't understand why we would see alarms and errors but they don't.

did they check for alarms and errors in their switch? or at the t1 level? if the errors are in one direction they may not see them until the span is tested. b-chan service messaging is a setting that tells the local switch when a b-channel is in or out of service in your PBX. Not all PBX's will support this.

I'm having the same issue with a ONE PRI and a Norstar switch.

Verizon carries the copper, and we have had numerous vendor meetings. I replaced my T1 card as a measure of good faith, which made no difference.
Customer still loses service once or twice a day, ONE swears it off. Verizon says it's ONE, and I'm losing my mind here.

I've had an issue like this where it turned out to be a compatibility issues between the last repeater in the loop and my smart jack, which wasn't apparent to the CO because the loop looked clean to them.

Basically I had to call them once a week for a month in order to get them to send someone out to stress the line where they then found the repeater issue. Have also seen a bad card in a shelf cause problems like this for another guy.

I had an issue with a LOGIX PRI just last month where you would get busies in the evening. LOGIX would always say "test good to the csu". So one night I went to the customer site & found alarms on my PBX & the circuit appeared to go "up" & "down" for a while, then just went down. The LOGIX CSR had the gall to tell me she could still see the csu, but, not my PBX.

The next day LOGIX pushed a.t.&t. & a bad repeater was found on the circuit......




I posted the entire event in the installers forum for those who have not enjoyed it. The title of the post is "After Hours"...

I've had similar problems (3 times). Turned out to be a protocol mismatch between the backbone provider (at&t) and the intermediate provider that provisioned the circuit (1 communications).

What happens is the circuit is slowly slipping frames and after a while the PBX drops the circuit to re-sync.

Had that today.

The FDN tech comes in and starts dismantling the Total Access 750. The old circuit was fractional with 9 voice lines on a PRI and the other channels as Data. Well the place brought in a second T1 for just data and they were converting the pre-existing T1 to a full PRI.

The FDN tech hands me a cut sheet with all new DID's. I immediately stop him before he can even grab his screwgun and have him call the CO back and rebuild the PRI with my pre-existing DID's. Problem averted I thought.

Once the cutover was done the PRI link would go up and sync and after a few minutes drop calls and give me an amber alarm. After about an hour of me going "WTF" and the FDN tech saying "It's all good on our side" I finally made him call back into the CO and verify the cut-sheet. The Cutsheet had NI2 hand-written on it for the PRI signalling but since I had them re-do the PRI with our old DID's it was DMS100. According to the tech at the CO they were actually going to plug us into a new switch and that's where the confusion came up.

I adjusted my settings and things worked fine

I don't advise opening the LEC's equipment, but you could in theory connect a laptop to the smart jack card and check the error log there.

I've had to prove 'intermittent' problems that way before.

Most CLECs will not believe it could possibly be anything wrong in their network unless they can either {not loop the smart jack} or {see the red light on the SJ} and they can be gosh darn stubborn about it too.

The only time I ever see verizon lock the SJ is when it's in a warehouse... so there's not much they could proove.

They are fairly easy to pry open even when they are locked.

Well, one common reason is, because they may not actually be looking at your circuit. They might be looking at the wrong circuit. This is *very frequent* with carriers-- remember, you are calling their NOC and speaking with someone who is considered a trainee, compared to the ASA (OSX) or Engineering group.

When you call them up, have them monitor the circuit live while you are speaking with them. Then simply unplug it and ask them if anything has changed. If not, you know they aren't seeing your circuit. If they see a red alarm (OOS - aka Out of Service), then you know they atleast have their paperwork right.

Next thing is to ask them what they are testing your circuit with? For example, a Centest650 won't see EXZs when a Titan 5500 DCS will.

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If you have a problem with a T1, have your carrier dispatch a field tech with a TestPAD or TBERD and come and go intrusive on the line, on both sides of the demarc. And show you exactly what they are seeing.

By doing this, there is no confusion, and you both know what is going on. The TBERD will show you exactly what is happening, and the field tech can talk with the NOC to explain exactly what he sees, so they can check optioning.

If you were in Georgia, I'd just bring mine TestPAD over and help. 15minutes, you'd be good to go.