You’ve got your AT&T IP Flexible Reach, a.k.a. IP Flex/BVOIP, service provisioned and set up (which was probably a monumental feat in and of itself), you’ve placed your test calls and now you’ve placed your first order. If you are like me, this has probably been your experience:
- You place the order with your account team. Maybe they acknowledge your order, maybe they don’t.
- After several days or weeks of no response, you follow up but don’t hear anything.
- After several more weeks your account manager discovers that there was an issue with the order and it needs to be placed again.
- After several more weeks of waiting you finally receive confirmation that your order was accepted
- Several more weeks of waiting
- You get a meeting invite for the middle of the day (when you requested an after-hours port)
- Yadda, yadda, yadda
- Two to three months later you’ve finally ported your numbers
Now you get to start all over again and figure out what black magic you have to work to make it happen in half the time! I’m hopeful that this post will help you avoid some of the painful mistakes and issues I’ve encountered on my own IP Flex journey over the years.
Here are my top 5 recommendations for how to improve the AT&T IP Flex number porting experience:
- Make sure you have Letters of Authorization Signed.This important form confirms that you own the numbers that you are requesting to port. Your order is almost guaranteed to fail if you do not have this signed and submitted with your order.
- Pre-qualify all of your sites for IP Flex at one time. AT&T has a group that will pull Customer Service Records for your branch offices and review all numbers associated with your account. They will do this for any location regardless of whether or not they are the LEC. This saves an unbelievable amount of time for you as the customer because you don’t have to go to your LEC and ask for those records. This one step has virtually eliminated ALL issues we’ve had with incorrect orders or missing DIDs on our orders.
- Create Branch Office Extensions (BOEs) ahead of time.Think of a Branch Office Extension, or BOE, as a bucket inside of your IP Flex service. You have your main IP Flex “Nodes” where your calls come in on your SBCs. Those nodes have addresses associated with them for 911. Obviously, not every single site you move to IP Flex will have that address, even though the calls come in and go out of those devices. This is where BOE’s come in. They carve out a space in your environment where AT&T knows that a specific DID belongs to a specific 911 address. This ensures that when an emergency call is placed on the IP Flex network, AT&T knows exactly which PSAP (emergency responder) to route it to.
- If you have a large number of branch offices, can you commit to porting 20 or more sites? If so, AT&T can commit project management resources to your account to help with submitting and tracking port orders. Typically, this person will have IP Flex knowledge and will understand what internal systems to check whenever there are issues with orders. Sometimes this can save a full MONTH’s worth of delays.
- Check your email! Seriously!AT&T is notorious for assigning multiple order writers to process your order. I will often get lengthy, jargon-filled emails from order fillers that I don’t always understand. Often these emails have a one-liner at the bottom of the email stating what action I need to take for the order to proceed to the next step. Read these emails thoroughly and carefully. Don’t be afraid to email your account team asking for help, especially if you have a project manager as recommended in point number 4. AT&T will cancel your order if you don’t respond in time forcing you to reset the clock on your port order.
- BONUS! Set your engineer as the local contact on the order.In fact, there is no reason to list a local person from your remote site at all: with SIP trunking everything is centralized. Listing the name of the engineer responsible for porting the numbers is critical because all email commuincation about the order will go to this person. If you split responsibilities for engineering/operations and order placing make sure ALL individuals are included as contacts on the order. This will save you headaches down the road as your order works it’s way through the AT&T systems.