Opening a Trouble Ticket for Your Dedicated Circuit

After you have some preliminary information about the trouble with your circuit, you need to call your carrier and open a trouble ticket. It's at this time that you will realize the benefits of having a technical cut sheet. If you have not made one yet, now is a great time to do so.

Going through the basics

If you don't have a cut sheet, you need to write down the circuit ID for every circuit that is having problems, at a very minimum. Your carrier needs this information to identify your circuit and begin the troubleshooting process. In addition to your circuit ID, your carrier might also ask you the following questions:

• Does your hardware show any alarms? If so, what color are they and where are you seeing these alarms (CSU or multiplexer)? Both the alarms and their location indicate to your carrier what kind of problems your circuit is experiencing. If you have red alarms on your multiplexer, the carrier knows that the circuit is down hard and that your business has no phone service at all. On the other hand, if your CSU is experiencing yellow alarms, your circuit could be intermittently down and bouncing back. If you don't know this information, you can simply tell your carrier that you haven't checked yet, but that you still want to open the trouble ticket.
• Have you rebooted your multiplexer/CSU, and if so, how did it affect the problem? You might temporarily resolve some problems by rebooting your hardware. Rebooting enables your hardware to refresh the connection to your carrier and synch up. The only variable you are testing when you reboot is the multiplexer. If the problem clears when you reboot, your hardware is probably the source of your issue. If it persists without any change when you reboot, the source of the problem could be within your carrier.
• What are your hours of operation? In the event that a technician has to be dispatched to your office to fix the problem, your carrier needs to know when someone will be there to let in the technician. If you have an after-hours employee who will be on-site, be sure to provide that employee's name and phone number (if the system is down hard, provide a cellphone number). You don't want the technician to arrive and have no idea where to go. If the receptionist or building security has no idea you have a technician on the way, but the technician says, "I was told to ask for Janice Jackson," he or she is more likely to get through the front door.
• When did you first notice the problem? This information gives your carrier direction in the search. If there was a large outage that hit your area an hour ago, and that is roughly when you noticed the situation, the carrier can easily combine your issue with the overarching trouble ticket (sometimes called a master trouble ticket). Of course, your problem may not be related to a larger issue, but offering a time frame does give your carrier some indication of events that occurred that may have caused your issue.
• Who is the site contact? Your carrier needs to know who to call for updates. Please provide a direct phone number, a cellphone number, and a secondary means of contact if your contact plans on being unavailable at any time during the day. It's painful to pick up a voicemail from your cellphone after you have lost four hours because you ran into a meeting, got busy, and didn't have time to listen to it until the end of the day.
• Is the circuit released for intrusive testing? Intrusive testing is the most direct way your carrier can investigate an issue with a dedicated circuit. The main downside of intrusive testing is that your circuit will be completely down while your carrier takes over every channel. Of course, if the system is already down, you have nothing to lose. On the other hand, if your circuit is active when you release it for intrusive testing, any active calls will be disconnected when the carrier initiates the test. See the section, later in this tutorial, "Step 2: Intrusively testing: Looping the CSU" for more information about timing your test.