Installing the Circuit | Telecom For Dummies

There is a standard procedure for activating a circuit. Every carrier has its own twist on how they do each step, but essentially, every dedicated circuit installation follows a normal progression.

Before everyone arrives on the conference call to activate your circuit, you are probably not connected to the new phone jacks, and your carrier will have the T-1 level of your circuit busied out (that means that if you connect to the jacks and try to call out over the circuit, you can’t complete a phone call, or even receive dial tone). The technical term for the disposition of a dedicated circuit prior to installation is IMB, or installation made busy state — see the accompanying sidebar for more information about IMBs. So, you can’t make any test calls until your carrier manually activates both the T-1s and the individual channels, called DS-0s.

Step 1: Introducing and reviewing

After everyone is on the conference bridge, the first thing you need to do is some general accounting and review. Some of the people on the call may be calling in on their cellphones and working in a wireless-unfriendly environment (most phone closets or server rooms are wireless vacuums), so you will need to write down everyone’s name, company name, and phone number so you can call them back in case they get disconnected.

Tip If I haven’t already implied this throughout the chapter, let me be very clear: you are running this conference call; you need to take the lead by running through the details and getting the information you need. You’re essentially coordinating the situation, so with your leadership (and barring any major technological glitches that are outside your control) the situation is likely to go smoothly. Or you could let the installation become a free-for-all or a circus by not being in charge. Your choice.

When everyone is accounted for, review the specifics of the order you are installing. This process should take no more than 30 seconds; run down

The number of circuits you’re about to install
Their line coding and framing
Their outpulse signal and start
Their trunk group configuration
The quantity of toll-free numbers
The DNIS configuration

Welcome to your own private Bermuda Triangle: IMB

Technical Stuff Prior to installation, every dedicated circuit will be in an installation made busy or IMB state. Busying out the circuits in the IMB state prevents the circuits from accessing your carrier’s network and causing it to show alarms on your circuits. All carriers monitor circuits, and if your hardware isn’t installed, your carrier’s monitors see the circuit open and alarms are activated in your carrier’s network. By placing your circuits in an IMB state, the network blocks your access, your circuits aren’t seen as open, thereby stopping those alarms from blaring.

Whenever your carrier sees that your hardware is disconnected from the dedicated circuits on its network, an alarm sounds. Carriers hate alarms. The official, consistent response to an alarm is to place the circuit in an IMB state. That means that if you disconnect your circuits on Friday night to move some hardware from one phone room to another, and you plug them back in on Monday morning, you can expect to be blocked from your carrier’s network. You will have to arrive on Monday and open up a trouble ticket with the carrier to have the dedicated circuits taken out of IMB. It doesn’t matter if your circuit has been up for six days or six years; your carrier will eventually block your circuits and put them in IMB if you have them unplugged for any significant amount of time. Of course, the definition of significant varies from carrier to carrier and day to day. Sometimes you can go 12 hours before the IMB state is instituted. Other times you’re sent into limbo after just two hours. You can call your carrier’s customer service department on Friday and open a tech assist trouble ticket for Monday morning so that a technician is available to reactivate or correct any circuits that don’t want to come back to life. Your circuit stills end up in IMB, but the trouble ticket provides someone to reactivate the circuit before you need it. I cover setting up tech assist tickets in greater detail in Chapter 13.

You can rattle this information off just like a laundry list (check out Chapter 8 if you have questions about line coding, framing, and outpulse signal and start peruse Chapter 9 for information about the RespOrg LOA, which includes trunk group information and DNIS), but the idea is that you give everyone a chance to validate what you are activating. If your carrier has only two circuits listed for installation (and you’ve got eight), or a different outpulse signal and start, it is better to find it now than after an hour and a half of testing.

Step 2: Connecting your hardware to your carrier

When everyone agrees on what’s being installed, and nobody is confused about the order, connect your phone system to the new T-1 jack on the wall, listed with the circuit ID for your new long-distance carrier. After you plug the cable into the jack, connecting your phone system to the local loop, your carrier should activate the circuit by bringing it out of IMB. Your circuit is now live at the T-1 level, a fact that your carrier will confirm if your hardware appears on the network radar.

Remember Your carrier will always turn up the highest level circuit first, and work his way down to the T-1 and the DS-0 level. If you ordered an OC-3, he will activate and test the OC-3 level first, and then the DS-3 level, the T-1 level, and finally the individual channel or DS-0 level. You can’t activate the lower-level circuits until the upper-level circuits are running clean. The DS-0s will not come up if you are having problems at the T-1 level.

Step 3: Activating the individual channels

The individual DS-0s will be activated after the T-1 level is working fine. At this time, you know exactly how your installation is progressing. If the rep from your carrier tells you he sees all of your channels up and idle, you should be looking at a simple installation and you will be done soon. If your carrier is having problems either at the T-1 or DS-0 level, it may take a few hours to work through all the issues.

Tip If problems arise, don’t forget to write down what the problems are, what tests are run to resolve them, and so on.

Step 4: Making test calls

After the DS-0s are activated and everyone sees them in an idle state, you can make some test calls. This is simply a fancy telecom way of saying make a phone call. It is easier for everyone if you can isolate the exact channel you are dialing out on for your test calls, because it allows the installation tech at your carrier to monitor that circuit and watch you dial out. If your phone system doesn’t allow you to designate a specific DS-0 to send out your call, that isn’t a problem because your carrier can find the record of the call after it is made.

As long as you can grab one of the individual DS-0s, dial out, and the call completes without any static, echo, or being sent to a recorded message telling you that your call can’t be completed as dialed, you have a successful test call.

Remember Test every T-1 circuit you have, just to ensure that all lines are working prop-erly. When all of your test calls complete fine, you can accept the circuit from your carrier and the carrier closes the dedicated circuit orders.

Step 5: Testing the toll-free numbers

Testing the inbound calls on a dedicated circuit is always done last. It would be a catastrophe if you had moved over all of your toll-free numbers on to your dedicated circuit only to find out that the circuit was configured incorrectly by your local carrier and won’t be fixed for 48 hours. Toll-free numbers are very delicate creatures, and after you move them someplace they aren’t supposed to be, it may take quite a bit of effort to move them back as they were intended.

If you’re migrating existing toll-free numbers to a new circuit with a new carrier

If you’re activating existing toll-free numbers that were migrated from another carrier, you need to have your carrier build a test toll-free number before you do anything. Your carrier should have an inventory of toll-free numbers for this very purpose. Together, you and the installation technician need to do the following:

Technician configures one of the carrier’s test toll-free numbers with the same DNIS digits, ANI delivery, and ANI Infodigits requirements that you’re using for your toll-free numbers.
Technician points this fake number to your new circuit.
You call the test toll-free number.
You and the technician confirm that the test number is hitting your phone system, that the DNIS is being accepted, and that the call is being sent to the correct extension within your office.
If a problem is discovered, the technician makes corrections and you go back to Step 1 of this list before the toll-free numbers are updated to the route path.

Potential problems include incorrect information being sent in the DNIS stream, or an incorrect routing (meaning that the call isn’t hitting your circuit).

Remember At the time of installation, your new carrier must be in RespOrg control of the toll-free numbers; however, the carrier won’t be receiving the traffic on its network yet. Only after the calls on the test toll-free number successfully complete should the carrier update the SMS database and have the calls routed onto its network. If the installation technician routes the calls onto the carrier’s network before the test calls are terminating properly, he may not be able to send the calls back to route over the previous carrier in the event of a problem, essentially endangering your ability to accept calls from your toll-free numbers. At that time you would either have to accept that your toll-free numbers are down until your carrier can repair the problem, or escalate with your carrier to find someone in either the RespOrg department or toll-free routing department that can send the traffic for your toll-free numbers back to the previous carrier. During this process, it’s very important for you to listen to the sequence of events so that you don’t inadvertently let something happen that could prevent you from using your phone lines. If something bad happens to your toll-free numbers at this point, go to Chapter 9 for assistance and options for resolution.

If you’re activating new toll-free numbers to a new dedicated circuit

If you are activating brand-new toll-free numbers, you can use one of your numbers as your test number because if the numbers are down for another 24 or 48 hours, it shouldn’t really matter (the loss of toll-free number access that heretofore hadn’t existed is inconvenient but doesn’t threaten your business).

Your carrier’s installation technician and your hardware vendor should be able to see the exact DNIS stream being sent back and forth. As long as the call is hitting your circuit, the technician should be able to correct the rest of the handshaking issues (issues that affect how your phone hardware and you carrier’s hardware play well together).