Thread regarding CenturyLink layoffs

God, I wish we could lose all the 911 centers, it's the only thing keeping us in business. Even with all the fines for piss poor service. The cable company has all our residential customers thanks to MAX.

Ok we do have gpon and ethernet at these business but they are not our customers the cable co leased our fiber and took the contract for all services and we let them over and over. This company has become like sprint they don't want customers. We have alot of customers on that old copper plant but we don't want their money.

Re: "Strange because exact opposite in my area, we have lost all major accounts from 911 to big business the cable co. took them. the only thing doing good is hsi to residential."

You are probably in an area where CTL has not penetrated with our fiber distribution and transport network to support the demand for packet switched services like GPON, EPL, EVPL layer 2 transport and distribution to the customer premise. Once we have a GPON or Ethrenet connection to a business or residential premise, we can sell voice services over SIP, in addition to internet, entertainment, and security services.

Cable companies are still taking a lot of customers in these area's where we have not penetrated with our fiber network, but their hybrid fiber/coax broadband network is inferior to ours once we get fiber transport and distribution facilities in place. Our copper network is the most obsolete of the transport and distribution mediums, but the cable company's hybrid fiber/coax network is going into the obsolescence heap right behind copper.

Strange because exact opposite in my area, we have lost all major accounts from 911 to big business the cable co. took them. the only thing doing good is hsi to residential. Even though the company seems to be trying to get them to cancel. New deal is 1.5 for everyone because that's all they can get this week but not last month it was 10m. But they still sell it as high speed and don't always tell them what that high speed is.

@10jLm3Sb-exu —Righteous Post ! So dead on, if it does not shake you awake NOTHING will ! This is CTL in a new nutshell.

Walk into your CO and look at the frame. What is the percentage of spares? L3 didn't do that. Now go look at the D4 channel banks. How many cards are plugged in and lit up? Go over to the M13 multiplexers. How many channels are active? Go over to the HDSL-DS1 shelves. How many cards are plugged in and active? Go over to the DSLAM rack. How many ports are still active? How many ISDN-PRIs are still working in the switch. How many frame relays are active, and how many TDM circuits are mapped in the DCS? Go over to the DSX-1 patch panels and see how many jumpers there are left. Go to your Calix C7 COT. How many green lights do you see? All of these are obsolete legacy analog wireline and TDM design services. L3 management didn't do any of that.

Now walk over to your core ethernet switch and see if you can even find an available spare port. Go over to the Calix E7s and see how many lights are flashing there. Now go over to the optical patch panels and look at the bundles of new jumpers there. All of these are highly profitable packet switched design services that customers want. L3 management is now doing that.

A tour of your local central office will tell you all you need to know about the reality we are facing.

about 14 hours ago by Anonymous | 3 reactions (+1/-2)
Post ID: @10jLm3Sb-exu

Exactly right! Well put.

Walk into your CO and look at the frame. What is the percentage of spares? L3 didn't do that. Now go look at the D4 channel banks. How many cards are plugged in and lit up? Go over to the M13 multiplexers. How many channels are active? Go over to the HDSL-DS1 shelves. How many cards are plugged in and active? Go over to the DSLAM rack. How many ports are still active? How many ISDN-PRIs are still working in the switch. How many frame relays are active, and how many TDM circuits are mapped in the DCS? Go over to the DSX-1 patch panels and see how many jumpers there are left. Go to your Calix C7 COT. How many green lights do you see? All of these are obsolete legacy analog wireline and TDM design services. L3 management didn't do any of that.

Now walk over to your core ethernet switch and see if you can even find an available spare port. Go over to the Calix E7s and see how many lights are flashing there. Now go over to the optical patch panels and look at the bundles of new jumpers there. All of these are highly profitable packet switched design services that customers want. L3 management is now doing that.

A tour of your local central office will tell you all you need to know about the reality we are facing.

Seems like Jeff is saving the company a ton of money by not wasting limited resources on non-productive work like doing locates. Those excavators will likely end up hitting the plant regardless so just deal with it then. And how does that affect you the tech? You might get some ot doing the splicing. If you take the call after hours that is. If you are taking pager duty on a voluntary basis. So why all the outrage? Jeff is re-imagining the work flow and it doesn't include non productive tasks like locates. I'm half joking. We know why they are not doing it and the best you can hope for is the OT doing the splice work.

A lot of the union issues belong to the person you see in the mirror. If you don't like your Union, you know who to blame. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens through complacency. You get the exact Union you deserve and vote for. I hear techs complain all the time that they have no voice and that is generally true. Guess what? The Union is not there to take care of techs and labor issues in case you have not figured that out yet. If you don't like it you can still become an agency fee payer in most states and limit what you contribute to their PACs. That would at least send a message if enough people were unhappy. And from reading these posts, it seems like they are. Don't blame anyone else for your present situation. There are plenty of jobs with great benefits that are not Union or CTL. There are companies that care about quality employees. You just don't happen to work for one.

Welcome to the real world with the rest of CTL. We have been living this sh!t since Level3 took over

Of course the farmer is lying to the cow. The farm-hands will become even more upset and the cow will stop producing even faster if it knows that it's being sent off to the slaughter house.

But I did use the world "reality" in my Farmer Brown post didn't I? The cow is old, and the farm's customers don't want milk from old cows any more. That's reality. It's also a reality that the farm does have products other than just the cow, and the farm's customers do want those products.

All that energy that you are putting into being upset and adversarial could be put to use developing new skills to continue working on the farm when the time comes to send the cow off to slaughter, or perhaps work at another farm somewhere else. Reality dawns like the rising sun over the farm sooner or later. The question is, when are you going to wake up and face it?

Well farmer brown, we still like to drink milk after all these years. But, the farmers cows are sick and dying but he won't spend the money for the vet, because he wants to put all his money in corn.
His workers are all p-ss-d cause they are tired of dealing with dying cows. The customers are all p-ss-d cause they can't buy any milk and they won't buy the farmers corn, cause they are p-ss-d at him because he isn't producing enough milk. He has to cut standby pay and IT so the workers say screw it and won't take care of the cows.
So now, the farmer is lying to everyone who wants to buy milk telling them eveything will be ok as soon as he sells off his corn, but hebis secretly trying to sell the farm without his customers or employees knowing.

Think of the old copper distributed, circuit switched telco as a cow in the pasture of a farm. The farmer calls the cow in each quarter and milks it and sends it back out to pasture again. Over time, the cow gets old, and isn't providing milk the way it used to in the past. But this isn't a problem for the farmer because the farm is a holding company that has other animals and produce than just the cow. The farm will survive because the farmer had the insight to realize that the cow was getting old and decided to add a few other animals and crops to the farm to replace it. The farmer will keep calling the cow in to milk it so long as it's still producing some milk, but when the time comes when the cow can no longer produce, it will be sold to the slaughter house, and the farmer will depend on his other animals and produce to keep the farm running.

It's called the "Holding Company Farm," and the cow is only one part of it. This is the reality of farming in today's corporate world. If you want to work on the farm, you have to be prepared to do other things when the cow is sent off to the slaughter house.

Well yes. SROs have become useless and angry,customers are irate. moral is nonexistent, everyone is depressed or/and suffering some illness and the company is going down the tubes. I always worked hard but I liked my job. Since level3 it seems that the only purpose is to run off customers and abuse employees just to break the union which exists to try to prevent this behavior. Why can't the CEO just RUN the company and make it good again without some crazy vendetta which is destroying what's left of it? SMH

Where have u been. Old news.