All them DS0's! Man that job sounds sweet, I may move to Canada soon! You guys use Cisco call manager? That one has always eluded me.
I'm not too familiar with all the microwave stuff, I know there's SR500, and I think RD6 and similar as well. If I recall the dishes are about 45 watts or so but probably really depends.
The stuff we play with the most is DMS100. We can go in and clear alarms, run tests, etc... Though everyone tends to have their own expertises. I can do basic stuff like setup phone lines and what not but some people know way more and can get into T1's and stuff. I'm not too familar with the actual commands to work with those. Basically you can go in and see the 24 channels and so on.
Totally forgot to mention we monitor fibre transport as well, though we don't do too much with it as far as troubleshooting, mostly just call someone if it's something major like a ring that is open or big links down. Most of the transport is fibre now days, it's mostly the remote areas that are on radio.
We monitor CDMA cellular too, though that will be decommissioned soon.
At this job you have to know a little bit about everything. Even the oddball stuff that you never really think about, like when you call a number and get the 3 tones saying it's unavailable and it changed, we set that up too.
All them DS0's! Man that job sounds sweet, I may move to Canada soon! You guys use Cisco call manager? That one has always eluded me.
Lot of Cisco and Juniper stuff, we don't really touch any of that though other than say "yep it's down" but we have a whole other dept who plays with that stuff all day. And yep lot of DS0's. We even have some DE4 channel banks here, those are old school. The DMS handles lot of em too, a bit better space density there. We probably have customers on Cisco Call manager PBXes, but think most of em are an Nortel stuff like Meridian and such. Voip is the future though so I imagine they're slowly going to start moving towards that eventually.
Man...I am so jealous right now. PM me in 12 years with your company's name so I can sign up. Sounds so sham, especially if you only have to worry about your own little piece. Nothing infuriates me more than when someone subnets wrong and it takes me 9 hours to figure it out along the whole freaking chain of garbage it takes to get interwebs and phone out in the middle of a field because I suck at subnetting.
The network techs are the ones who really get to truly play with all that stuff. I've considered transferring when I see a job opening, but I'd have trouble going back to a 8*5 schedule though and it would be a pay deduction. We get paid a lot at this job because of the shift differentials and stuff. Sundays and holidays pay quite a lot. I'm kind of spoiled at this job with all the time off I get too. Lots of opportunities to learn though because of all the stuff we see and sometimes when I talk with network techs they explain stuff to us and what not.
Like one time we were dealing with a huge outage because a piece of equipment fried, like, the entire rack did. Lost 911 service and whole bunch of other critical stuff. Was interesting to understand what was going on and see it get fixed.
When shit breaks is when you learn the most. When I was in Afghanistan I ran a site, had a LOT of different pieces to it, was really mind-blowing and tough as shit but in the end I learned a lot. Once I had to figure out how to call a Carrier from middle-of-nowhere-afghanistan. Was an intense week to be sure. But we got it! :awe:
Oh man it's the Danny D! Haven't seen that lil' guy in a while.