WS has a few network operation centers across the country. As people are losing their jobs and downsizing continues. Has there been any talk about the noc's merging together?
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Many of the NOCs were outsourced. I was a net tech and when we got dispatched in at 2am we were on the phone with someone that couldnt speak english. Channel sales, outsourced repair teams, outsourced NOCs.....just a shell company at this point. Going to be nothing but directors that work from home left working at windstream. When is the last time anyone actually saw a director in person? l
Greenville did have a great noc at one point. The generators were tested every Wednesday. It was broken up into voice, data and transport. I happen to have been a voice tech. So yes, at one point it was a very knowledgeable noc. My x was in transport until he got laid off after a company No one had ever heard of bought us.
Don't slam nuvox. We knew our network and we knew the equipment. I grant you he could run circles around most. He is now in wireless. And again extremely talented. And that's my x so I have no reason to lie about the man
"I never understood why their were so many in the first place"
Because every few months there was either a new director or something of higher 'priority' that took over any discussions on downsizing the NOC's.
After WINMQ 'bought' Paetec, Nuvox and Iowa Telecom, the workers there should have been given a choice to go to wherever WINMQ had their NOC's, and then shut those down from the purchased companies - so there wouldn't have been so many different NOC's where they did things different than WINMQ's methods. When Verizon or AT&T buys a company - they shut down that company's NOC and any other overlapping groups, and give them an option to work in Verizon or AT&T's system, or they can leave.
Nobody had any guts to decide to close down the NOC's from the purchased companies, so you have now so many that confusion is normal between groups. Greenville was always a weird choice to keep open - as they couldn't drive into work when it either snowed a few centimeters, or a rumor of a Tropical Storm would appear on the weather, they wouldn't go into the office.
And the 'talented' directors/executives took away the emergency NOC that WINMQ used in Hudson, Ohio for disaster recovery - which they would test once a year by firing it up and manning the temporary NOC. Not so with Greenville - they 'forgot' to check the fuel in their backup generators for years, and never had a backup plan if Greenville couldn't be manned, as eventually the other NOC's weren't staffed like Greenville.
The executives turned a blind eye to this, it was figured out years ago that if they could outsource the NOC's - they would in a second. And guess what happened?
I never understood why their were so many in the first place
I’m a former life we debated getting rid of the NOC constantly, either through automated notifications or outright outsourcing our alarm monitoring. In the end we kept it just because it looked good and we had too many other higher priority projects at the time. The general consensus was to ditch it though
They don’t even push buttons when they see alarms. They open tickets for network techs. They do zero trouble shooting and make zero attempts to fix anything. They simply open a ticket for an NT with the notes “please investigate”.
Yes, multiple nocs are stupid. Hec you could run a NOC via automation/automated notifications and not have anything centralized other than the servers (and yes you should have geographic diversity/redundancy but we are talking jobs not machines) They are expensive and are mostly part of the dog and pony show.
Depending on what you definition of NOC is there will be some consolidation. Some people consider a NOC as anyone who manages network elements facing each other or peering with a carrier. Others considers it to be "Customer Facing". As we have already seen with the Voice NOC those jobs were outsourced and not consolidated. I think this will be the trend forward. Some helpdesk monkey will maintain the switches and cores with no understanding on whats really going on. I see an alarm and I push a button scenario.