Smartnet replacement

it_consultant

In the course of a couple of days we replaced our 2 Cisco 3925 routers which are used as voice gateways. The first one was inexplicably rejecting phone calls, despite having channels open on the PRI and the other would connect the call but you could not hear the other person. That was tossed up to having a bad DSP chip. We spent 4 days on the phone with Cisco TAC for various phone issues related to those two problems. It didn't help that the beginning of the month is when we get the majority of our call volume. That volume increased dramatically because we upgraded the Cisco Call Center from 8 SU3 to 8 SU4 hoping to correct an issue where customers were being hung up on by the IVR at random. That SU4 upgrade included a java upgrade. Java is used by our custom IVR which takes credit card payments over the phone. Since that wasn't working right, the call volume (to speak with an agent) went up dramatically.

The situation got so bad that the Mayor of Aurora (yes, of theatre shooting fame) emailed our director.

I have no love for cisco, but it seems like having two failed routers is pretty unusual. Our call center software sucks quite badly, Cisco is not really on the same level as NEC or Avaya when it comes to that, but we have, at the maximum, 40 agents in the CC. Routers are Cisco's bread and butter product and truthfully TAC was very helpful and got the parts out in 2-3 hours.

The major Cisco partner that we contract phone support too...not so helpful. It was pretty interesting when I had to explain to TAC (and the Cisco partner) how to use the monitor switch in the busyout command to effectively bar new calls from coming into the router without disconnecting calls already in progress. I have never used the busyout command (my experience is on Avaya phone systems) but Cisco documentation is very easy to dive through when you know what you want to do.

it_consultant

Replacing the DSP chip didn't work...this might be a RGE (resume generating event) for us.