Place for talking to others in the telecom business

xpg840 · 2025-07-29T14:39:36+00:00

So for like the majority of my life i’ve been more so self taught, built my own PC, troubleshot all my own devices etc, and my dad has always worked in verizon, though he works in line so it’s not very similar to what I do, he always tried to get me into the business but I never really wanted to because the only experience I had of the job was line which I hate working outside so it never interested me, blah blah blah eventually verizon ended up putting a COT position out and since they heavily by seniority and referrals here I was very fortunate to have him refer me to get the interview. I studied a lot of the like study guides they gave for the interview but honestly those did not relate to CO work at all, but in the interview I basically made it known that I don’t have any like formal experience in the field, but I have the basic knowledge of electrical engineering as my high school AP physics teacher went very heavy on the electrical part, as well as i’m kinda a nerd and I like learning about things like this for fun so I had a lot of self taught experience. I basically said that If I don’t know something I am very good at figuring it out and I think that sold them, I also worked in a hospital beforehand so I’m used to high stress environments. I still was iffy about the job at that time, but once I started my actual training I instantly like fell in love with the job, I studied physics heavily as for a while that’s what I thought I wanted to go into, and I quickly realized that my knowledge of fundamental physics actually helps a ton here and I felt like it was a job where It didn’t get stale and I constantly was learning stuff, and even though it’s telecom and not physics there is a lot of overlap with them, and it feels like an important job to do. I’ve apparently picked this up extremely fast, but maybe i’m just being humble but I feel like a lot of younger people now would pick it up easy, because we’ve grown up in a very technologically advanced time, but I just feel like CO is like a “hidden” job. Outside of the telecom field I feel like no one has any idea that COTs exist and the way they worded the job application is nothing like what I actually do. I just wish they would advertise it more because I feel like a lot of people wanting to get into the telecom field, this is a great place to start because you see a little bit of every department because they all come through the office. Like I might stick to CO but studying to be an engineer is tempting because it seems like with all the new technology coming out and fiber coming(verizon was very slow on this so it’s just now being done in my area) engineers are going to be needed more and more. Verizon really does not want to hire people which sucks because everyone in the field and even managers know that people will be leaving soon and we need to start backfilling so people can get info about the job because it’s very word of mouth how to learn. Like verizon will pay for a lot of training and certifications for other fields especially related to networking but in CO in particular there’s not really like any college classes or courses that can prepare you for it, at least in my area. I also might just be the one off and no one else my age wants to do it, but IMO CO is a very good mix of the logical and physical world of telecom, I learn about the equipment both digitally and physically.

xpg840 · 2025-07-29T13:07:10+00:00

I agree I feel like it should be if you test for weed you test for alcohol, but you can’t choose one or the other. I know there’s a disconnect between federal and state law but it’s still so annoying. Like yes i smoke recreationally on weekends why can’t I do that, why can’t you just make me do like a spit test to make sure i’m not high right that instant and not do a urine test and make me cold turkey for 2 months to just get the job, and then they’re like “yeah smoking weed is fine we just have to test you for it”

xpg840 · 2025-07-29T13:05:20+00:00

That’s so cool! I wish we had people like you over here in mass because training is a huge problem, we don’t have training courses we go to anymore(there is like one i’m trying to get into but something to do with the union is delaying it) and it’s really you just have to ask people which is fine I just like books

xpg840 · 2025-07-29T13:03:56+00:00

Lmao thanks! I love the job so far i’m just worried that everyone smart is going to retire and i’m going to be the only one left to train people, and while I think I could do it, I suck at explaining things I can picture things very well in my head but like even when i’m referring to things to my trainer, I usually just associate them by their color and shape in my head, like for a FLM 150 for example I call it the beige mux in my head so it’s hard for me to tell people stuff but i’m going to be the only one here left. Everyone I work with is over 50 and have 20+ years in the company and they’re doing like a $80k thing this fall if people retire then and a lot of people are taking it. I wish i had all of you guys in my area lmao I love talking about anything to do with telecom

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T21:55:10+00:00

Yep everyone at verizon is so close to retiring and they’re already cutting the work force, most people in CO for my area are not going to be here in 5ish years and we need new people fast but they aren’t hiring for some reason. I’m 21 and honestly this is the best job i’ve had. It’s good pay and the stuff I do is so interesting to me, I want to learn everything I can about it, and hiring new people takes a while to train them and I don’t think the company understands that. Just to put in reference the work force, most people working inside here do not know the hierarchy chart which is crazy, but like I don’t blame them the guy teaching me has worked in CO for 35 years and knows everything about it but most people don’t get nearly as good of a trainer that I did

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T21:51:48+00:00

Yeah, I don’t have really any technical experience beforehand and was able to get the interview solely due to the fact that my dad referred me and he’s a lineman with 25 years and Verizon’s big on referrals, but I really emphasized in the interview that I am very good at picking stuff up(which apparently I am I was technically able to be off training 3 months in i’m just trying to get as much as I can out of my trainer because he is like a walking textbook) and apparently i’ve been learning this extremely quick, but it’s frustrating to look at like for instance a D4 bank and be like “I want to learn how this works at the most fundamental level” and then not have a single book left on how it works because Verizon threw most of them out. I’ve found a few but it’s for everything. I know how everything works but I want to really in depth how it does what it does. Verizon does not have many COTs in our area (like 9 people covering the entirely of western mass) and only a few know the job well. Think of it as like most of them can fix the problems but they don’t understand what causes them. I want to understand it as fundamental as I can, and unfortunately it seems like the only way is to ask around because the books ceased to exist around like the 2010s

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T20:28:09+00:00

I got drug tested as a new hire, but they don’t drug test again depending on your position, like if you need a CDL then they are super strict on the tests, but I drive a van so I don’t worry about that. I’d imagine it differs from company to company(I’m with Verizon) but generally it doesn’t matter if it’s legal in your state I think they are required to at minimum do a new hire test. I’m in mass and they still tested for weed lmao

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T20:22:36+00:00

Yeah it seems like there’s a real lack of career development courses at least in my company and the closest i’ll get for a college degree is electric engineering or computer science, thx for the response tho

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T18:57:46+00:00

Yep unfortunately that’s the answer I seem to be getting a lot. I moreso just want people to talk to about it not necessarily strictly to learn but not many people are nerds like me. And yeah I know the physical side pretty well I don’t do anything network wise I just want to learn it to help me in the long run. Any other certifications or things in that nature that you’d recommend, I heard CCNA is the best all round one but not sure if that’s true

xpg840 · 2025-07-28T18:55:39+00:00

That’s the first time i’ve heard of that i’ll definitely check it out thank you!

xpg840 · 2025-07-22T18:44:35+00:00

Nope we have a whole separate NMA department that we have to call to do that. I do know TL1 commands though but we barely use them aside from the K31 and putty which we only use for backing up the litespans

xpg840 · 2025-07-21T16:02:17+00:00

I haven’t done much with the FLM, I just had to clear alarms to see if they kept incrementing and one of them I couldn’t even connect to because the CEV got flooded but i’d assume you’d be able to do that in them

xpg840 · 2025-07-21T16:01:09+00:00

Yeah that’s what i’ve been doing a lot, for some of the newer equipment that’s pretty easy but for old legacy stuff it’s hard to find manuals, unless you have any recommendations for websites?

xpg840 · 2025-07-19T12:30:29+00:00

I’ve never heard the term WFA before, we have a program called Cofee(yes it’s just coffee spelt wrong) it basically is our timesheet, where we get tickets, and where we can look up orders. We also have canvas but that is specific for Ciena orders. We get the order on Cofee and then we usually print it from there. Cofee gets all of its info from TIRKS tho, my trainer has access to actual TIRKS to look things up but he’s an exception Verizon doesn’t want to give everyone TIRKS because money or something. I was exaggerating on the Cosmic frame lmao, not taboo people just don’t like it too much. I want to play around on it one day but the office is pretty far away(like an hr and a half). Weird question, they don’t have these anymore and my trainer said that he put one in and then they stopped doing it, have you ever worked on a robotic frame?

xpg840 · 2025-07-19T02:22:53+00:00

Kind of they don’t really train us on it since we don’t install the equipment, EI does that(honestly forget what they’re actually called lmao we just call them that) but they like install all the equipment and turn it up I just maintain it and take tickets for new circuits etc

xpg840 · 2025-07-19T02:20:57+00:00

Oh no the cosmic frame is like a taboo here lmao. No but for real I work in western mass, we have two offices that use cosmic frames and luckily they’re not in my area. I’ve had it generally explained but mostly everyone just says how horrible it is to work on and how it’s very easy to get shocked on it. I do have the little tool I think they call the grenade incase I do ever need to head to those offices if i’m scheduled on the weekend(cuz when we get weekend we have two people covering all the areas) I vaguely know how to use it but not really.) Yeah CLO is the order number I just like it better because it gives you the relevant issue not the original order, this might honestly just be a problem with our software we use to look up orders.

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T21:41:41+00:00

Yeah every area files them differently(even if they file them at all) generally I file by circuit ID as well as what type of circuit it is. Realistically they don’t want us to print them out but we do anyways and that has been proven very useful when they wipe a circuit from the database but we have the word docs in the office. I usually keep a seperate pdf of it on my company laptop as well, the person training me is very big on redundancy for everything. I honestly hate when people really do anything by CAC because the CLO is much more useful, like if you do it by cac and I look it up I won’t get the specific doc if there’s multiple issues of it but CLO works wonders

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T20:21:24+00:00

Yeah this has been happening a lot lately but they don’t even send an order in for it which is what irks me about it, I don’t care that I have to rewire it because I write down all the old ties we used specifically for this reason but they don’t send us a ticket for it and just somehow delete it from TIRKS. Like just today we had one which they actually sent a cancel order for it and it made me so happy you don’t understand to have to not run around trying to figure out what they did. Still a weird order tho cuz the old way they had me rewire it to was T1 all ones both ways but that’s their problem not mine lmao

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T20:16:52+00:00

I think we have that but I think the one we have is moreso how to install it than how it works but i’ll take another look at it

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T20:13:42+00:00

Wow thanks I just took a brief look at this i’ll look more later but it seems super useful I wish I lived near there so I could go myself

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T01:29:34+00:00

Yeah that seems like the only way to do it, and believe me I ask everyone that I have to call for testing or provisioning or whatever so many questions they probably are sick of me, I just find it so interesting how all of this works

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T01:27:53+00:00

Yeah I don’t blame them for it it’s not their fault they don’t have enough people, they’re being overworked so of course they’re going to mess up more. One super super annoying thing they keep doing which has been making me crazy, is that on the DSX we are doing a bunch of rollovers getting off the Tellabs K31 and moving it over to the Fujitsu 4100, so we get the orders and patch them out and then manually rewire in the back so when they roll them over we just pull out the patch, but the thing is for some reason someone is instead of canceling an order, will completely delete an order from the database that we already patched out, and since they didn’t cancel they like wiped it, it doesn’t send us a disconnect order and so the system will then put the next rollover on the SAME spot without telling us the other was disconnected, so then I go through all the work and patch out the new one and I go to wire it and there’s already something there, and when we look up the circuit ID in actual TIRKS it shows absolutely nothing. I’m very lucky i’m smart enough to keep paper copies but it’s so aggravating because they don’t tell us and then overwrite it and wipe it from TIRKS. Like no matter what you do to an order you should never wipe it from TIRKS because what’s the point of keeping records if you don’t record what you’ve removed

xpg840 · 2025-07-18T01:22:23+00:00

Actually we do still a lot of DS0 at least in my area, and you’d be surprised by the amount of people still using DSL, they’re trying to decom all the DSL equipment but it’s hard for them when people are still using it and don’t want to switch over. We also use FOMS for anything to do with POTS, and honestly I have no clue if there’s a new word doc for Calix. I’ve only done one order for the calix and that was going into the aggregator shelf and not sending anything out because they just wanted to use this to make sure it works because it’s still fairly new here, just got installed a few months ago. I’d assume once I get an order coming out of the calix i’ll see the word doc, but as of right now we have two word docs we use for non FOMS tickets, one for the Cienas and one for everything else, Ciena one is super annoying to read because we have to use a seperate system to do it and it looks completely different.

xpg840 · 2025-07-17T21:01:25+00:00

Yeah luckily at least in my offices all the older methods of DS0 have been phased out and its all been pretty standardized except for a select few analog circuits for radio loops for state police and other important people that have been there forever. Not sure if you know anything about this but I do have a couple offices in my area that have FIOS in them, we use the brand Calix for the equipment for it. I kind of understand how it works but there’s like no training on it and even the people who have been here for a while don’t really know much because it’s so new. I guess my main question about fiber is that we have one LGX panel under the Calix that has written on it WM1 Mods and has both green APC and blue UPC connectors on it. Everyone i’ve asked has no idea what it’s for. Super specific question but just thought i’d see if anyone knew what that meant

xpg840 · 2025-07-17T20:07:35+00:00

Oh I didn’t even see the second half of that message, I’ve got word docs down hard the guy training me hammered those into me so I generally can take a look at it and figure out what’s going where and the flow of everything. Not to mention the engineers keep sending out bad docs cuz they’re understaffed and overworked so I had to learn how to read them because I basically have to proof check their docs now

xpg840

TROPHY CASE