A few years ago, my wife and I woke up in the middle of the night to a sound that no homeowner wants to hear.
Not a smoke alarm. Not a dripping pipe. Not even the classic “what was that noise” that turns out to be the cat.
It was wings.
We both sat up, half asleep, and realized there was a bat flying around our bedroom. Not a cute storybook bat either. This one was doing tight laps between the walls and then diving at anything that moved. It was also crashing into the wall with an enthusiasm that suggested it had never seen drywall before.
We did what any calm, rational adults would do. We hid under the covers like it was a force field, then crawled out of the room like we were escaping a laser grid in Ocean’s Eleven.
Once we made it to the hallway and shut the bedroom door, I immediately proposed the most appealing solution.
“Let’s sleep on the couch. We’ll deal with the bat in the morning.”
Problem contained. Door shut. Sleep restored.
My wife did not agree.
Her view was that this plan was not kind to the bat, and it also was not kind to our walls. Because if you leave a panicked bat trapped in a bedroom all night, it is going to keep doing what it is already doing. Flying. Diving. Crashing.
And eventually, bleeding. All over our bedroom.
Her next suggestion was that I should climb onto the roof of the front porch in my boxer shorts, approach our bedroom window from the outside, open it wide, and give the bat a clear exit route.
I want to be clear here. It was the middle of the night. I was half asleep. I was dressed like a man who had planned to do absolutely zero outdoor roof work that day.
But she was right.
I climbed out onto the porch roof, opened the window, and waited. A few minutes later the bat found the open air, shot out into the night, and that was that. We went back to bed and slept soundly for the rest of the night.
We also fixed the torn window screen the next day, a problem that I had been ignoring for months.
The telecom lesson: the problems you postpone do not stay the same size
This is the part where we pretend this is only a cute story, but it is not. It is a perfect metaphor for how networks behave.
When something goes wrong in a phone network, there are two common instincts:
- Patch over it and hope it goes away.
- Close the door, sleep on the couch, and deal with it later.
Sometimes that works. Often it does not.
Because most network problems do not stay politely contained. They keep running laps inside the system, bouncing off walls, and eventually creating visible damage that is much harder to clean up.
In telecom terms, that damage shows up as:
- Small call quality issues that become chronic, then become customer complaints, then become churn.
- Intermittent one-way audio that becomes a support escalation, and eventually a reputation problem.
- Minor packet loss that becomes a widespread voice quality incident as traffic grows.
- A small fraud gap that becomes a large fraud event because the attacker is always awake, even when you are not.
In other words, if there is a bat in the bedroom, shutting the door is not the same thing as solving the problem.
The best fix is the one you do before the bat gets in
The funniest part of this story is that the real solution was not the porch roof adventure. The real solution was a boring household maintenance task.
Fix the torn window screen.
That is also the most useful lesson for ILECs and service providers in 2026. The highest leverage work is often the unglamorous preventative work:
- Make sure IP paths are engineered for voice, not just for best effort data
- Monitor jitter, loss, and latency before customers notice
- Tighten fraud controls before the first big event, not after
- Treat robocall mitigation and STIR/SHAKEN requirements as systems engineering, not paperwork
- Keep translations, routing, and interconnect assumptions current so “random failures” do not become normal
Most of those tasks are not headline grabbing. They do not feel like innovation. But they prevent the kind of midnight emergency that turns into a bigger mess at 2:00 AM.
A practical way to think about it: open the window, then fix the screen
In our bat story, we did two things:
- We gave the bat an exit route right away.
- We fixed the screen so it would not happen again.
In network terms, that maps neatly to:
- Short term mitigation that stops the pain now
- Medium term hardening that prevents a repeat
This is how you keep voice calm and predictable while you focus leadership attention on broadband and fiber builds.
If you have a bat in your network, we can help
If you are seeing any of these right now:
- Persistent or intermittent call quality issues
- IP network behavior that is fine for data but rough on voice
- Fraud or robocall mitigation gaps that feel like a moving target
- “Random” call failures that no one wants to own
- A voice platform that is technically working but operationally stressful
We can help you get it back to boring.
Award Consulting’s focus is to make it easy for ILECs to operate reliable, compliant voice networks without constant firefighting, so your team can spend its energy building the ISP business that matters most.
If you want a second set of eyes, hit reply. We will help you open the window, get the bat out, and fix the screen.
