I am a high school student, and I have been doing some cabling work over the past couple of years. I have seen a lot of bad install jobs on the phone side, not only from electricians, but especially alarm guys. I had a new alarm put in this past summer, and when the installer wanted to put wirenuts on the wires on the RJ31X, I almost kicked him out of my house. I have also worked with many pros who have been in the field for many years, and they do a great job. I have basically been trained by these guys and I have seen the right way to install cabling and phone systems.
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I concure with you that see "Everyone wanting to be a phone guy" as a problem within our industry. Not only is it a problem with people pulling cable but it is also a problem when you get an "End-User" wanting to do MAC and installation work. These people come to sites like this and pose as installers and unfortunately get help. Unfortunately and fortunately everyone that posts regularly on this site are good helpful people and are more than willing to help their Brothern. In order to protect each others revenue stream there must be a way of verifying who is and who isn't actually a "Phone Guy". Any suggestions.
The days of key system installers having job protection are nearly over. Face it, they are easy to install and some now have GUI interfaces. I am quite certain we will be leaving the key system market again as we have found that it's basically not worth it anymore. 90% of the crap (maint) service calls are made from 10% of the ports we service ie. the key systems. They complain the most and pay the least. I don't know how anyone makes money in these size ranges IMHO. We have been playing with the small systems for a couple years now and IMHO the next board meeting I am voting to nuke them and go back to the larger systems as that is our bread and butter.
To show you how easy it is to install a phone system for the newby, I was at my distributor about a week ago and their on the counter where cd's put out by Panasonic showing how to install the 624 and vm.
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by thall - Samsung Rep: ... In order to protect each others revenue stream there must be a way of verifying who is and who isn't actually a "Phone Guy". Any suggestions.
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Ask them some "Phone Guy" questions, like "Tell, in order, the primary and secondary colors in a 25 pair cable" or "Describe the different USOC interfaces", or "What are split pairs and why should it be avoided". That should weed out a few of them.
Just one comment as far as job protection. Somebody mentioned earlier that GUI applications are making it to easy for systems to be programmed. This is true. However, systems are getting more and more feature rich and detail orientated when it comes to programming. The further the systems advance the more features there are to program. So to sum it up, the end user that has a GUI application is going to be faced with a thousand or so different options to program with the laptop. So they are probably not going to know even where to start. My thoughts anyway !
All of these post's I have found both interesting and true. This is one of the hardest times when anyone can go and get the materials to do what they believe they can do. The most important thing for me to be concerned with, as someone stated earlier, is to have the proper testing equipment and cover my rear with my guarantee's in regard to the performance of cabling that someone else has installed. Owning a small business is tough and I am sure that they (small business owner) wants to cut costs. But I give several examples and references in regards to the quality of my work, as well as, the cost benefits of doing it right the first time. More often than not the customer sees my point of view.
Part of sales is to earn trust, and part of installer is to keep it and build it.
