Today whilst Martin has been out at a client building a network for them from scratch, including installing the cables, sockets and switches, then adding the PCs, a NAS box and sharing the resources – so we can get a Disaster Recovery backup for them – I have been trying to get a GPRS modem to work.
The modem is built into a green energy monitoring system, which records the amount of energy the PV (photovoltaic/solar panel) installation produces and then transfers this data to a web portal. Previous boxes I have set up were connected to the web by ethernet, however that is not possible in this case so a GSM modem board has been installed in the unit.
After a search of the sim card provider’s web site I confirmed all the settings, but the unit would not connect to the portal. Support in the UK passed me onto the support team in Germany. In the meantime the sim card stopped working!
Having reseated the sim card and got the signal back I called Germany – who needed an ID we did not have! But at Octagon we do not give up. The support engineer looked it up for us but we still had to wait for a return call.
Having worked my way through the new setup with the support engineer we decided to try a European access number (*99***1#) rather than the UK number supplied by Orange (*99#). When we tested the connection it worked.
When we got back to the factory to test the unit we still encountered a problem but this we think is due to the availability of a data connection at the site. As part of this testing I photographed the event log screens and these are being sent to the German support. I have written a plan for the client to progress the job and I will help them with this next week.
We cannot always fix things first time round, because for whatever reason the issue cannot be fixed, but Octagon Technology never walks away stating “That’s someone else’s problem”. We truly support our clients.
