Phones line Nightmares

[dapaulio]

Apologies if I placed this in the wrong forum and TBH not sure how this question is deemed within an ICT technical scope, but any help would be appreciated as BT or the school staff are not very helpful in the slightest. Iv inherited this as no one seems to know or is willing/be bothered to investigate, and as you know what other people cant be bothered doing is instantly an ICT issue.

 

I am trying to inventory all the physical phone lines that enter the building, determine whether it is active or not and work out the service/role it plays within the school. This is for the purpose of offering a disaster recovery plan in the event the server room burns down and have to relocate to a new comms rooms where I can get internet access from. You can see why I am involved now. Any questions I ask to colleagues who really should know are in no way helpful.

 

The active phone lines were easy to find as I plugged a phone in to the bt points which in turn offers a dial tone and a number when I ring my mobile from it

 

I have managed to find 3 numbers so far that are active but only one that BT can offer me information on is the one I knew about having had it installed myself and documented properly.

The other two active lines BT state are not on BT systems

 

Like I said I would like to know how many physical lines enter the building but BT are not being helpful. I would have expected at least that BT would have documentation/schematics of all the lines entering the property.

 

Thanks in advance

[mikeprice]

I think I can see your problem

 

"I would have expected at least that BT would have documentation/schematics"

 

excessive optimism I would say

[jamesreedersmith]

Are you talking to BT retail (the customer facing mob) who will only have instant info on lines people pay them for or BT Openreach (the poeple who provide lines etc for all and sundry) who will know about it if its a BT cable.

 

Finance people are good to talk to in this instance as they know who money is paid to - remember look for any other company names that may be used (talk talk, plusnet etc etc) or are the lines provided by a central council contract.

 

Are the lines part of an alarm system and possibly provided and paid for by the alarm company as part of the contract?

[dapaulio]

Are you talking to BT retail (the customer facing mob) who will only have instant info on lines people pay them for or BT Openreach (the poeple who provide lines etc for all and sundry) who will know about it if its a BT cable.

 

I started speaking to bt business who suggested i contact my business account manager at bt business local who was no help suggesting I speak to billing in Glasgow who then was very straight forward talking saying that he apologises, I should have never been put through to them as the enquiry doesn’t even remotely touch billing and gave me the details of some escalations manager back at bt local business who after several words and emails exchange got me nowhere.

 

I did think should I try get hold of openreach but they harder to contact then trying to get telephone conversation with the queen herself.

 

Finance people are good to talk to in this instance as they know who money is paid to - remember look for any other company names that may be used (talk talk, plusnet etc etc) or are the lines provided by a central council contract.

 

Are the lines part of an alarm system and possibly provided and paid for by the alarm company as part of the contract?

 

Tried that and they were no more helpful than BT. Been looking for the obvious providers but there is no obvious paper trail associating those numbers with a company. One of them is connected to a Cisco pbx, the other is connected to a fax machine but either no one knows who provides our phones or they are just being damn awkward.

 

Whilst this should be easy for the connected services, this wouldn’t account for the lines that are disconnected which I am also interested in

[dapaulio]

I think I can see your problem

 

"I would have expected at least that BT would have documentation/schematics"

 

excessive optimism I would say

 

I’m an optimist and see the best in everyone. I was clearing wishing upon a star

[dapaulio]

Is there a way of querying telephone line providers like a Whois lookup on domain names?

[mikeprice]

I’m an optimist and see the best in everyone. I was clearing wishing upon a star

 

Yes - I try to be optimistic but I have given up with BT

This is due to moving into a new house about 7 years ago - which was already wired up for BT - with a BT box on the outside and BT sockets inside

but it still took over 4 months for them to admit that the house existed

When I spoke to the engineer to finally tested it he was the person who wired up the street when the house was built - and it was already all working when I moved in

if it hadn't been at a time when I wasn't at work I would have taken about 7 or 8 half days off work waiting for appointments by then

 

So BT are NOT my favorite supplier!!!!

[elsiegee40]

Isn’t it OpenReach that maintains the lines? BT just provides the phone service.

@localzuk has had many arguments with them and may have suggestions

[dapaulio]

Isn’t it OpenReach that maintains the lines? BT just provides the phone service.

@localzuk has had many arguments with them and may have suggestions

 

That’s my understanding but they are difficult to speak to anyone in a position that knows and physical lines aren’t the only question I need answering.

 

Need details on active lines which no one at bt or in the school can answer.

 

I was hoping that someone may know of a way or a service like Whois for domain names that would tell me who is providing on a particular phone line.

 

I can expect my day tomorrow to be a frustrating one

 

Thanks everyone

[forkies]

Finance should have all bills relating to line rentals. The problem with your DR is that all those lines are probably all entering premise at the same point, leaving a single point of failure, likewise your electricity feed.

[dapaulio]

Finance should have all bills relating to line rentals. The problem with your DR is that all those lines are probably all entering premise at the same point, leaving a single point of failure, likewise your electricity feed.

 

You would think so with finance but no. Whether it’s ignorance, or they really don’t know they are not getting me the info I need.

 

Our backups are housed in a secure house on the school ground away from the main servers and is completely separate from the main school building by a fair distance. It’s not on the same electric don’t know how but have known the school to be without whilst the house remained online. The disaster would have to be fairly significant to wipe the house as well as the school.my plan would be to reinstate the bt line in the property as a backup line if the school server room became out of service

 

This is slightly aside from my issue detailed above but is linked to the reason why I’m asking this question.

Edited April 11, 2018 by dapaulio

[Meldrew]

We did once upon a time get a long printed list of all our services from BT. Our supplier at the time managed to arrange this somehow and unfortunately I don't know how they went about it (but your best lead would be BT local business. try again). I think your best way forward is your finance department, but can you come at it from a slightly different angle. I'm thinking is there someone in particular who is in charge of your telephony budget that has to sign off the bills? Otherwise, going back to your finance team direct, maybe what you are asking for is a huge dig through endless paperwork to find something that isn't exactly highest priority for them. Could you ask them to let you know next time that any bills that are charged to the telephone budget come in? That won't be anything like so much work.

Finally, your DR 'house', does it have a different postcode? What I'm thinking is if the worst does happen, your existing lines are pretty much irrelevant. All you need is your new line at your DR location. If it has a different postcode (you may find it has several - we did), you can look at getting a line installed anyway.

 

HTH,

 

Meldrew.

[XiJ]

I was going to suggest that BT open reach would be better than business but HA HA HA HA HA HA

 

I think openreach would be the line installers - but good luck !

[jmak]

Sorry, but it's your finance people who are letting you down here. It's fairly unlikely that a supplier will keep giving you service that you're not paying for.

 

We have three lines and I'd only expect BT to be able to tell me about one of them - the main line, supplied by BT. The second is supplied by Virgin and the third is Red Care - a BT line, but not supplied to the school. BT should have records of the Red Care, but shouldn't tell us about its billing as we don't pay the bill.

 

You are not an Openreach customer - by regulation they're not allowed to tell you about the services - they have no contract with the end user.

 

Finance shouldn't be paying for anything that they can't tell you the purpose of. Obviously if it turns out that they're paying BT for all of them, you've got a complaint against BT too.

[robjduk]

If it were me, I would approach a smaller phone company and ask them to take over the phone system for you. They will have the contacts to document the thing and get it working. May be a labour cost but its what they do all day. You could no doubt even negotiate cheaper call costs as a way to sell it to the higher ups.

We're going to a VOIP system soon as my understanding is the older lines are going to be replaced in about 4-5 years time anyway so could be worth just calling it quits and investigating a different system to start from scratch with.

[XiJ]

Good point about Openreach and end customers. I wasn’t thinking from that point of view - we’ve just had dealings with them for 3 schools recently so they’re fresh in my mind.

 

I’ve known schools who are paying for lines they have no idea about though. So sometimes finance don’t have the answers.

[Fazza]

Apologies if I placed this in the wrong forum and TBH not sure how this question is deemed within an ICT technical scope

 

I'd say it's covered by the C part of ICT.

 

As others have mentioned, your Finance department is the starting block they'll know what bills you have had over the last year and phone numbers etc. should be listed on them. You can then cross reference them with what you've found and you should then know what is left (if anything) to find.

[dhicks]

It's fairly unlikely that a supplier will keep giving you service that you're not paying for.

 

No, this is BT - they assure us that the phone line over to a room in a secondary building was cancelled four years ago, despite ADSL services still having worked on it for most of that time. We seem to have been paying for the ADSL services, but not the phone line. We think the only reason ADSL suddenly stopped working is that someone else on the same exchange had a new phone line installed and used the phone connection.

[Chris_Cook]

You could try calling 17070 or 150 from the unknown line. That should tell you the number, or at least get you though to the provider. These should work even if the line isn't covered by a contract, as long as you have a dial tone.

 

Or if its an internal extension, maybe try calling another internal number. Sometimes internal lines are run on the outside of the building and may look like BT lines.

[Katy]

We have a similarly "fun" time getting anything out of finance, I found trying to make it as easy as possible for them helped - e.g. if there's a specific telephone budget ask for a listing of anything paid on it (which should show the supplier), you won't have the invoice that way but at least you'd have the supplier name. In my case I managed to find out the nominal code for the phones budget to make it even easier for them to look up and send me a listing off PSF.

 

I've got a friend who works for a telecomms supplier and he says they can query the network to see what company "owns" the line, although it's not 100% successful, so if you could get hold of the numbers for each line (17070 even if there's no active service on the line) then any provider should be able to do that.

[CHU]

Been in a similar situation ourselves. Only it was finance chasing for what lines are in use. We’ve been paying for 8 analogue lines for years and no idea what they were for.

 

Finance should know what they pay for, if they’re not helping. Look at what services need lines and maybe work backwards contacting the companies.

 

Redcare - fire alarm

Alarm monitoring

BMS LA control

Remote utility meter reading

Lift emergency line

FAX / Franking machine

Main number

 

Quite a few of ours were old fax lines and such to a lower school that was bulldozed 9 years ago.

 

Our telephony provider is Lloyds-IP and they put the lines on temporary cease for a month. If no one kicked up saying hey we’ve lost connection then we’ve been cancelling them.

 

Good luck

[dapaulio]

@Chris_Cook and @Katy

 

Thank you that was the answer I needed (or part of it anyway) . Dialing 17070 from a phone line that has a dial tone gave me all the info I needed associated with that line. I am eternally grateful to you both.

 

Thanks for everyones suggestion but if it were obvious and my finance team did know I am sure they would tell me. It could be that the phone bills are part and parcel of a much bigger service, who knows. Companies moonlight in what seems to be the strangest of things for example. I found out that one of the lines was in service with ... who is affiliated with an IT subsidiary company (who installed the system) who of our accountants who include the telephone service in one big packaged bill.