Customer Power!
There's something karmic about big manufacturer clamping down on grey-imports to preserve their bottom line, and then being pushed around by the customers they're trying to screw. It's a fine-line to tread...
Cisco has prolonged Phoenix IT Group's termination notice period following what sources describe as a backlash from some customers over the planned move of certain contracts to BT. The networking goliath gave Phoenix marching orders at the end of last month, with sources alleging it was caught selling grey market kit and had …
BT are fine to work with. As long as you don't expect timely responses from their sales staff. Or competitive pricing. Or timely delivery of services.
This assumes you're working with BT in the UK. BT outside of the UK lose all those bad habits that seem to plague incumbent telcos in a market.
Up until last week I would have agreed with you. Until I was dragged away from what I was doing to deal with an Openreach engineer last week who turned up with an instruction to fit a line under an order that someone had affixed my name to. Such details as he had regarding the job were scrawled on the back of an envelope, and specifically referred to an office block round the corner that we also own, so he hadn't even turned up at the right building. The engineer had not been properly briefed as to where the line that he was fitting was to be installed or what it was to do, beyond that it was a "monitoring line". This did not appear consistent with the only Openreach order that I had on the go, and I asked him to contact Openreach to confirm the details. He informed me that he could not. An Openreach engineer, replete with Openreach bag and Openreach jacket could not call Openreach to check the details of a job that Openreach had assigned him. I think we could all benefit by pausing for a moment to contemplate the utter blithering idiocy of that situation.
By dint of patient questioning, a colleague and I were able to elicit that in fact the service to be installed had nothing whatsoever to do with the Metro Ethernet service that I had on order, and in fact was nothing to do with me whatsoever. My name had been spuriously attached to an order with which I had absolutely no association or involvement. We do not have any idea to whom notice of the installation should have been given, but can assume that they were not properly notified.
My colleague and I were obliged to stop doing our actual jobs to cater to an inadequately briefed engineer, who had been given incomplete and inaccurate work instructions and the wrong contact details, who had no means of correcting the deficiencies of the information that he had been given, and who presented at the wrong address. To cap it all, the service that I *actually* have on order I can get no information on whatsoever. BT. They're not even funny anymore.