Tag Archives: telecoms

Slingshot Saga continues….

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So after waiting patiently for the money they owe me, I decided one more chase up through their helpdesk would be a prudent move. Well certainly glad I did. All credit to the girl who took the call. I have to admit the waiting time today was virtually nill – straight through so well done there Slingshot! Somethings are improving, shame about your exit process for cancelled accounts which are still in credit?!

So following my phone call today, it seems that the only way for Slingshot to apply a credit is to create an update to a billing “cycle” – so if your cycle was the 27th of a month, then you can’t be refunded until after this date? This seems to be a very primitive system indeed that is if the finance team are being completley truthful here. I’ll be asking for a detailed response later from the manager of Slingshot. I requested to speak to someone in the finance team, but guess what? They’ve all gone home early today!!!! Add onto that my request to speak to a supervisor – they’re ALL in a meeting.

So in order to compensate me for the constant back peddling and changing goal-posts regarding my refund they magnanamously added $25 onto what is owed, provided I am happy to wait until the billing cycle.

What a crock….

I know I won’t get anywhere by going up the chain, but I will be writing a very frank letter to the Manager of Slingshot about this. Maybe he can offer me some insight into the primitive financial model they run, which works as long as you remain a customer and as long as you are NOT in credit.

More worryingly for me in fact is that on closer inspection of the terms and conditions it seems to read that Slingshot are not required to pay any refund on termination of the contract (does not specify whether the termination is initiaited by them or me as the user) this may well be one for Fair-Go?

Two Steps Forwards…One Step Back…(and breath!!)

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Started documenting my concept for customer focused MPLS today, i.e. we the customer have full autonomous control instead of the Service Provider – who ever that may be?

I am reasonably happy with the approach so far, but I’ll wait and see if I am breaking any best practice rules when I bounce this off our Cisco guru; so far I have elected to go with an iBGP core running LDP. using non-MPLS aware routers as route reflectors to fully mesh things and offer a little scalability.

How to offer multiple logical control at the CE end though?? In order to achieve this I have figured I’d go with eBGP peering to an elected private BGP AS getting around the obvious BGP problems this raises by using the ‘allowas-in’ and ‘as-override’ options and then mix in some vrf-lite with this on the CE devices and your vrf’s instantly stretch that little bit further without the need for an Enterprise image everywhere, oh and when it comes to internet access I’ll just peer with the public AS provided and look into ‘vrf-aware NAT’.

My next mission should I choose to accept it, is to get my head around QoS and figure out whether my approach is favourable for QoS or not.

The great thing about my job is I get to play with real kit! So it’s not all about theory at the end of the day. In that respect I consider myself extremly fortunate.

I have to say, I have gained a lot more appreciation this last week for the flexibility BGP provides when used in conjuntion with LDP it seems almost too simple at times, but then I haven’t factored in the QoS yet? So – this may all be moot. Can’t wait to plug my (our – sorry Jason!) muwahahahaa!!! lab into the voice test platform and run some voice calls across it….

In other news? Hmmm….let me see – I can’t wait for the new Indiana Jones movie!