WiConnect AUG 2020

Colourful • Creative • Crisp
Field Engineers
Delivering excellent client service, despite Covid-19
Our field engineers are continuing to maintain high service levels and to support the Covid-19-driven surge in demand for capacity from our clients, despite the current restrictions. We talk to some of them about their experiences of providing ‘business as usual’.
Susan Collins - Field Team Leader Europe and West Africa.
Working from home in London was a bit strange initially, as we are normally based in the Global Switch data centre, where our field team office is located. In the past, if I had to double-check on something, I would just walk to the rack in question but now, due to the pandemic, I revert to the records that I have.
Now that lockdown has eased, I can go into the office if needed, although I try to avoid using public transport as much as possible, and if I have to use it, then I make sure that I observe social distancing.
The restriction of movement means I’m not able to travel abroad, which necessitates an increased reliance on our Remote Hands and Eyes (RH&E) partners. For example, we are using them to enable us
to connect cross connects to WIOCC’s Optical Distribution Frame (ODF), in order to bring up a new service, which before lockdown was something we used to do on our own.
When we were severely locked down, I had to engage supplier site remote hands at London data centres, like Telehouse and Digital Realty, to complete patching requests. As soon as I realised that we were likely to face site restrictions, we put plans in place to pre-populate spare ports on equipment and fibre out cards, to make RH&E requests as simple as possible for our partners and WIOCC.
As we have seen, demand for capacity increased significantly as the world’s workforce changed to working from home. Despite all that’s happening globally, the field teams are still delivering client requirements. As a consequence of lock down, access to some of our sites has been more restricted than others. For example Equinix in Slough would only allow two people from the field team to access the site, meaning the other field engineers were nominated to access the London Equinix sites - thereby preventing potential cross contamination of sites.
To keep the UK field engineers safe from the virus, I made sure they all have PPE, N-95 masks and gloves. It took six weeks for the masks and gloves to arrive, even though I had ordered them from a UK medical equipment internet supplier. I also had to get the staff ID cards in case we were asked to provide evidence that we were essential workers.
Prevention is better than cure!