No. 0501 min read
What mediation taught me about people (not that kind of mediation)
Fourteen years reconciling billing records at Sprint taught me to check what I know before assigning blame.
#telecom
13 stories about telecom. Newest on top.
No. 0361 min read
Reading hex dumps: quit guessing at the damned bytes
Corrupt how, folks?
No. 0341 min read
The error queue is unfinished accounting. Go get it.
Your parser rejected the record.
No. 0331 min read
Sequence numbers are a promise. Read the damned promise.
A bigger sequence number does not mean your missing file arrived, folks.
No. 0151 min read
No customer impact. You think nothing happened?
Sprint's D3884 finished early and under budget with no customer service impact.
No. 0132 min read
Runbooks for a smaller team. Write down the damned part you know.
Sprint's mediation ops team went from twelve people to four without losing coverage.
No. 0122 min read
Fifty million dollars. Show me the damned rubric.
Twelve vendors, 130 switches, and a $50 million replacement of Sprint's mediation platform.
No. 0112 min read
Reconciliation as a job: where's the damned file?
Fourteen years reconciling Sprint's network records with mediation and billing: finding missing files, repairing damaged CDRs, and accounting for the money.
No. 0101 min read
Alarm fatigue: your monitoring system found the caps lock key
ELK and HP OpenView helped cut resolution time for actionable Sprint mediation alarms by half.
No. 0091 min read
Fourteen years at five nines. Yes, we patched them.
Fifty servers, fourteen years, 99.999% availability.
No. 0051 min read
130 switches, thousands of rules, and a manual that didn't know
Migrating 130 switches off Marconi CEOS meant translating thousands of billing rules without a usable spec.
No. 0041 min read
Two hundred and fifty percent. Yes, folks, it was Perl.
Sprint's mediation throughput went up 250% with Perl, Oracle SQL, and five processor chains.
No. 0021 min read
Billing mediation: somebody has to find the damned money
Fourteen years between the switch and the bill, finding missing money in binary records.