Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/58400
www.iltanet.org clean-up exercise. We already had our inbound fax numbers pointed to an electronic faxing service, so mirroring our remote call-forward configurations was very important. Choosing a PRI Carrier Choosing a national PRI carrier took some research, but we were able to find a good fit with Paetec (now Windstream). In most cases these types of carriers buy their services from local providers and leverage their buying power to offer competitive rates. Our requirements were predominantly built around reliability, billing and customer service. One of our biggest needs was to have a single support contact to work through service outages and an easy way to monitor or escalate trouble tickets. Our next big requirement was the ability to invoke failover options, either manually or automatically, based on scenarios that we defined. PRI Migration Process The migration for our PRIs required a lot of scheduling and pre-provisioning. We began with a series of conference calls with our new carrier, our consultants and our phone system engineers. During these calls, we addressed our overall timeline, capacity per site — both for circuits and on-premise equipment — and the physical logistics of each site. Once we agreed on an overall schedule, we chose the order for sites to be cut over to the new services. Two very important parts to each cut-over are the firm order confirmation (FOC) and local number port (LNP) dates. The FOC date is when the new carrier commits to physically install the new circuit. This install needs to be mapped out very clearly. In most cases, the new carrier will leave their DMARC in the MPOE or office telecom/data closet. The customer will be responsible for extending that termination to a desired location near the phone equipment. If the extension is not in place prior to the test and turn-up, 36 ILTA White Paper there will be extra charges and delays. The test and turn-up is very simple and only involves three pieces. • Circuit Verification: For our test and turn-up, we scheduled a conference call with the new carrier and their NOC, our phone system engineer and one of our staff members on the premises. During this call, we plugged in the cross-connect cable from the DMARC extension and verified that the circuit was seen as UP from both sides. • Local Number Port: When the LNP date arrived, we got all the same parties on another conference call. We scheduled our LNP for all locations to be at 5:00 p.m. local time to minimize disruption during the business day and give us enough time to troubleshoot before the next business day. • Test: Once the LNP was completed, we tested all inbound, outbound, toll-free and 911 calls. In some regions, there are older digit manipulation schemes that your phone system engineer may need to adjust for calls to complete correctly. When calling 911, we always immediately alerted them that this was a test of a new phone line and asked them to verify our address and business name. Completing the Project After completing our first site with success, we scheduled two office telecom consolidations per month for the duration of the project. As we moved through our schedule, we chose to suspend service on our old circuits, verify stability on the new carrier, verify that all our DIDs worked correctly, and then we canceled the old circuits. We saw some overlapping charges that were expected in this type of transition, but the consolidation has achieved our goals of having a single billing platform, a centralized support contact and added redundancy … and we are also saving money.