[SATLUG] DSL - San Antonio - Problem Update

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:25 AM -0500 4/8/07, M K Ramadoss wrote:

>                                            These businesses need to look for
>  backup such as a cable or dual dsl lines so that service is not interrupted.

IME, so-called "dual DSL" is going to be delivered over the same 
lines, and you're going to have the same technicians responsible for 
maintaining the lines.  Moreover, those technicians will work 
directly for one of those companies, and not the other -- guess who 
they will be more motivated to support?

If you want/need a dual or multi-WAN configuration, then you want to 
make sure to use separate technologies for each of the solutions.

>  May be this will provide business opportunities to sell more of bandwidth to
>  small business customers. I have not yet seen any computer or telephone
>  consultants bring up this issue with business customers, which they should.

The business-class cable companies definitely talk about this sort of 
stuff, when selling to SOHO customers.

It's a sad day when Larry the Cable Guy provides better quality 
customer service than the telcos, but that's the state we live in 
today.

>  I once again feel that if telco cannot find US workers willing to work in
>  their central offices during weekends, it is time to hire workers from
>  outside US, as the service reliability to customers should come first and
>  not the last. In most of the third world countries, working on weekends and
>  7/24 is taken for granted.

In my case, the problem was not the after-hours technical support. 
That was fine.  My problem was that the back-office support people 
only work M-F/9-5, and they're the ones that need to be involved to 
issue a lot of requests to get service fixed.  Once those are issued, 
there are guys in the field 24x7 for critical infrastructure.

But there's a bottleneck there that the telcos can't be bothered to 
try to fix.  Nor can they be bothered to try to empower the 
after-hours tech support personnel to be able to issue work orders 
directly.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>