Our customers encompass many industries. This particular bank site had been struck by lightning at the end of March – killing both VDSL WIC and BRI WIC in their Cisco 2911 router that does both voice and data. They still had data access over the 4G backup but no phones as that comes in over the ISDN2.
Our first trip to site was to swap out the VDSL WIC and get that back running. The ISDN2 was noted to be not synced to the NT1 indicating some sort of problem. The Telco’s NOC found they could not see the card in the router so a replacement was ordered. This was installed by another company recently (it’s a complicated arrangement with us doing some work and them doing some work) but the ISDN still didn’t come up. Telstra attended site and replaced the NT1 but still it did not work.
I attended site and plugged the ISDN2 into an Avaya IP Office I had brought for testing and with the intention to install temporarily if there were still further problems since the bank were not impressed about not having phones for so long. The circuit came up OK on the Avaya and I was able to make calls on it. When plugged back into the Cisco, it would not come up despite the card being administered down and then back up.
I gained clearance from the support organisation to install the Avaya as a replacement as it looked like they may have to source a replacement router. I went back to the car to get the phones, etc, made some small config changes in the Avaya, attached the rack mount bracket and was about to install it in the rack when I noticed an activity light on the BRI card. Some time in the 20 minutes since I plugged the circuit into the card it had decided to work. I confirmed with the NOC that no changes had been made to the router in the past 45 minutes.
This is one of those strange cases where things fix themselves. I don’t like this because there has to be some explanation. Will the problem occur in the future? The bank called their support organisation and had the call forward removed so in about 20 minutes they were receiving calls again.
If you have one of those tricky faults – maybe we can work our magic on it and resolve it for you. Contact us for assistance.
