Today's outages got me thinking, when a network has issues they'll sometimes call on-call engineers. All the main networks will have a NOC staffed 24/7, but they will need to call up certain specialist engineers and managers at certain hours I'm sure.

Do networks rely on their own network, or do they typically issue out competitor phones or sims as part of a BCP just incase?

How many field engineers are mobile network staffers anyway. I suspect many are contractors and/or staff from the equipment manufacturers, so there's likely to be a spread of networks used by the teams ?

Vodafone use Ericsson for a lot of network stuff, who I understand also use Vodafone for their company phones.

Well I'm not really referring to field engineers necessarily, although that could be a consideration. I was more thinking about firewall engineers, database guys, managers, executives, basically all of the functions that would be engaged in any major incident with the network, but who are not part of 24/7 office cover.

When I worked at a network almost all the staff used phones on the network, it's a lot cheaper that way, that included the staff working across the road at one of the regional switch centres.

Fair enough, I just thought that the day it all falls over it must be even more difficult having all your staff on the network that has fallen over. Not being able to get hold of some important functions because staff are using the same communications system that they are maybe incident managing or technically on-call for.

Just a thought!

I guess that when the network engineers notice their own phones don't work then they get a move on to fix the problem

I imagine that massive outages are pretty rare and the problem doesn't crop up too often and when it does they resort to calling landlines.

Maybe they use whatsapp over wifi or phone their landlines?

I've wondered this too, makes sense to have their staff on their network, but if their network falls over.... as mentioned I guess they'll use whatsapp or some other data dependent method, those guys on call just have to not leave the house I guess

They always used to have an on call pager, I presume they could still use a similar system.

All the networks use the same company for maintenance - that is Ericsson.

They do have staff that will only attend faults on one network but most can go between networks.

The staff are an amalgamation from Orange's own field force,, VF's own field force, BT and Ericsson who, over the years have all been tupeed (sp?) into the great machine of ericsson

So Ericsson do all the repairs? What about Cornerstone then?

What was the cause of the recent problem, did we ever get a reason?

I'm not sure how accurate that is, EE, for one, still have their own support engineers who are EE employees.

I'm an oncall engineer for EE and we carry a vodafone pager to alert us, but then use the EE mobile to call in etc. It's very rare for something to happen that would knock the phone out, and if it did we would just boot the laptop up and talk to the operations center via instant messenger or email instead. It mostly works!

Ah cool, Vodafone pagers, see I thought they must have something like this. I know it's rare like you said, but businesses must plan for events like this and it makes perfect sense to have a pager on another network.

I was thinking more along the lines of database, network, central infrastructure engineers and senior managers, incident managers etc more than the guys that fix base stations.

Thanks for replying.

Did they use to use PageOne pagers at some stage (back into the T-Mobile becoming EE days)? Or am I going mad?


I did mention the pagers in post #10 .

Yes you did, good to see a network on-call engineer confirm.

I used to work in the same building as the T-Mobile engineers at one time, wasn't hard to see them wearing their pagers or even having to send them messages

It looks like I only half read the OP.

What you are saying may be the case - I read the OP as field based faults, rather than switch/NOC based faults.

Before EE I used to work for Orange so not sure what T-Mobile used, but in the proper old Orange days we used to use Hutchinson Telecom pagers (same parent company as Orange), but I think they shut down the pager network so we switched to using vodapage instead.

We also get the pager messages sent to our phones as text messages as well. And if you fail to respond to any pager message they will phone you up after a couple of attempts