This is a juicy story, something I’ll never forget, but it all started as a normal working day in IT.
There was a scheduled meeting with our entire IT leadership, simply called “Organisational Update”, which we were looking forward to.
Everyone dialled in, others hopped in the boardroom, and we were told something along the lines of:
The business has secured a very substantial contract, and is going to be expanding in the coming weeks, there will be a project for this which we need you guys involved in.
Sounds like good news, right?
So a few weeks went by, and we started to see project tickets come in, meetings with project managers, work for us to do, cool.
What did we get assigned to do?
Well, we handled all desktop support, so we were asked to set up the Workstations, mobiles and peripherals for all these new users.
And so began the hardware procurement, this was not a small expansion, there were around 150 new positions to fill, and we had some pretty tight deadlines to meet the contract.
The way the expansion worked, was that most of our existing business sites would be renovated, and/or new spaces would be acquired to support the extra staff.
A portion of the new positions were fully remote roles, people that were sort of “contracted” for services, but treated as employees.
Every new starter (onsite or remote), needed the following:
- A cellular laptop, with a special SIM card (like this) that connected directly to the corporate network, no VPN needed.
- A laptop dock and 2x monitors, (if the users were fully remote, we would ship these right to their home).
- A laptop bag, mouse and keyboard, headset.
- An iPhone, with a Voice/Data service.
So what happened?
First, let me give some context:
For this project, we procured about ~90 laptops through Dell, the latest Latitude model at the time, with cellular.
We had a bit of a newer hire in my team, so management assigned the tasks over to him to get the laptops setup, let’s call him Kayden.
Our build process was pretty simple, just plug in a laptop, PXE boot, select the department within our task sequence, and everything gets installed, basically ready to go in an hour.
Kayden was working through all the laptops, no issues, all going smoothly.
Just pretend these are laptops, we built all our machines here.
Somewhere during this, our Telco team popped in to drop off a box of our special SIM cards, and Kayden got to work installing them.
But there was a problem…
None of the laptops were detecting the SIM card.
Let’s Troubleshoot.
Initially, Kayden asked around the team, got people to sanity check his work, things looked correct, so we needed to dive deeper.
I’m not going to claim I contributed here, this was all Kayden’s work, he might have been new, but he had a true passion for IT, and that comes with excellent troubleshooting skills and a great work ethic.
Through the process of elimination, Kayden identified the following:
- The cellular option is not showing up in Windows Network settings.
- Installing our special SIM card or a “normal” SIM card has no effect on this.
- The WWAN interface is not visible in device manager.
- When opening the laptop casing, the WWAN card slot was not populated.
- The above is true for every laptop we had just received.
This was not good news.
The next thing we did was check that the SKU we ordered was correct, yep it’s the cellular model, says so on the invoice too.
Dell Latitude 7440 Laptop, Integrated WWAN (Cellular) Kayden immediately notified the project manager that there was a problem, and he grabbed us the contact details for Dell.
Time to Email Dell.
At this organisation, we had proper channels to get support from Dell, we even had our own account manager.
So Kayden drafted an email, looped in everyone important internally, and waited for a response.
I apologise for the issue Kayden, I will check with our procurement team and get back to you.
2 days pass.
Thanks for your patience, I have confirmed there was an error with our shipment, we will send the missing parts now.
Wait what?
Dell is going to send us 90 WWAN cards, and leave us to it?
Yeah, this actually happened.
Getting these might have been enough to satisfy some orgs, just install the cards and be done, but our project manager was pissed (and rightfully so).
Hi Dell Rep, this is Darren, the project manager linked to this order. I am not at all happy with this resolution, we should not have to allocate our own resources to fix this mistake, we would like someone to come down and install the missing cards ASAP.
This was honestly a pretty good thing to push for, not just on principle, but also because we genuinely all had bigger things we could be doing with our time.
We were not a small customer to Dell.
We spent millions on their hardware over the years, they were basically our exclusive workstation/server/peripheral vendor.
For example, here’s a room full of maxed out servers we ordered:
So did Dell agree to help?
Yes, actually they did.
Hi Darren,
We will send a technician to assist, please let us know the best time,
I remember being in the office on that day, I was the only one available to let the Dell tech in, I gave him a visitor pass and kept a close eye on him, because he was in a sensitive area.
It took this guy all day, I’m not kidding, he was here for hours.
If you’ve ever installed a WWAN card before, you already know how finicky the antenna connections are, it isn’t fun.
After he finished up, I escorted him out, oddly though we still had about 20 cards left in our box, let’s ignore that, figure it out later.
This fixed the issue then, right?
You’d think so, but because Kayden already built all these machines, and they didn’t have the WWAN hardware installed at build time, the cellular driver wasn’t automatically installed by the task sequence.
So Kayden grabbed a device, installed the drivers, popped our SIM card in and enabled cellular.
No service.
Kayden checked the antennas, they were connected, we checked our auth settings, they were correct too, tried another device, ordinary SIM, going outside, same issue.
Time to email Dell again….
Hi Dell rep, there seems to be a problem with the WWAN cards that were installed, they are all saying “No Service”, even when outdoors.
Hi Kayden, my apologies, I will get someone from our technical team to reach out to you.
Our project manager Darren was getting increasingly frustrated at this point. He had a deadline to meet, and if the machines weren’t ready in time, the new hires couldn’t work.
Shortly later, Kayden received an email from Dell’s technical team.
Hi Kayden, this is blahblah from Dell’s technical team, can you please explain what the issue you are having is?
Lovely, the context hadn’t been handed over from our rep all the way, so Kayden filled them in, next they asked.
Please advise what OS version you are using.
is all software up to date
what sim provideer do you use?
can you confirm the sim service is active??
Honestly, seeing messages like this makes my blood boil, I know it’s all somewhat relevant and logical, but we’re not an end user, we know to update software in IT, we know that we need a cell service.
Kayden replied, giving them all the information they needed, and we waited.
2 days pass…
Hi blahblah, any updates?
Crickets…
Let’s investigate ourselves.
Kayden was in a difficult position here, an unresponsive and unhelpful vendor, no clue what was causing the problem (or if he could even diagnose it), but he decided to have a go anyway.
We knew:
- The Cellular card was being detected.
- We were in range of a cell tower.
- We had an active cell service
- The device was still not registering on the Network.
Naturally, his first point of call was to review forums, and Reddit threads, to see if there was anyone out there with a similar problem, there were a few but nothing concretely the same.
He did find that Dell has a page on this exact issue, but none of these fixes helped.
After a few minutes of hunting around, Kayden came across this page.
On this support page was a software download, for the specific model of WWAN cards that we were sent, completely undocumented anywhere else.
It couldn’t hurt to try anything at this point, so Kayden downloaded the tool, opened it up and it started the “activation process”.
Not long after, the system tray updated to show the signal strength indicator, indicating we were online!
So there we go, we’ve figured out the issue, the WWAN cards need activation, and Dell didn’t tell us that.
We decided not to tell Dell that we found this out, and left our case open with them to see how they would handle it.
To this day, Dell never figured out the issue.
I’m being 100% serious here, Dell never replied to us beyond their initial “technical info gathering” email, they left us in the dark.
It really does go to show that no matter how big of a customer you are, some vendors are just not that great to work with, or (more likely) are “too big to care”.
A few weeks later, I recall that we did receive 1 email from Dell requesting further information about our environment, but at this point it was completely irrelevant, our project was over
Anything we can take away from this?
Well nothing really happened internally in our company, our relationship with Dell remained the same, management just brushed past the issue.
I recall Kayden did get a well deserved reward in our monthly “employee excellence shoutout” though.
As for other orgs, and IT managers (if you’re somehow reading this), I’d advise the following:
- Never assume a vendor understands the real world behavior of their own hardware. If Kayden hadn’t gone digging, we would’ve missed our deadline waiting for an answer that never came.
- Be cautious when relying on enterprise support to solve problems. Once the obvious checks were done, Dell just stalled. The case stayed open, emails went unanswered, and ownership quietly disappeared, you always need someone internal to drive stuff like this, or it falls flat.
- Recognize and back team members who see problems through to the end. Kayden was new, but he trusted evidence, followed the issue end-to-end, and solved something our vendor couldn’t. The project shipped on time, users were onboarded, and the business never knew how close this came to failing, not having employees like this is a far more costly expense to the business than it might seem on paper.
And that’s it, thanks for reading, don’t bully Dell please, this is all in the past, and we still like their hardware.
Cheers,
Chris
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