Sympatico outages ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 12:02:09AM -0500, Michael Wilson wrote:
> i dont work for sympatico but I dont think you should
> assume that they should provide free network support
> for you. Most likely the reason they wanted you to
> just connect a single computer is because they wanted
> to confirm that it was in fact a sympatico problem,
> not a device in your network. Thats a good
> troubleshooting technique.
> 
> I have worked PC LAN tech support and believe me,
> there's a million PC LAN configurations. A tech
> support agent cannot know all of them.

<RANT>

I personally think the way tech support at an ISP SHOULD work is that
when you call the tech support person checks the network status rerpot
for hte network to see if the network operations people are aware of any
outages at the moment which might cause a problem.  Unfortunately with
all the outsourcing of call answering many large ISPs are doing, they
don't do anything other than follow scripts to check that your settings
are right (which is essentially useless tech support in most cases).

The ISP I use for dialup (allstream.net) had an outage on friday (I
think that's the first time I have seen one in 8 years), and I first
called the network status line, which said they were having problems
with email servers, so I tried the tech suppport number, which has a
nice menu option that sumarizes the settings you should be using for
connecting to the system, so I checked those (just in case my ancient
settings didn't work anymore), but that didn't help, so I checked the
network status again, and they had updated it to report authentication
servers were having problems.  I didn't even need to talk to a tech
support person then, since I knew what the problem was.  about an hour
later it worked again.

Telling people to rearrange their setup if it worked 3 hours ago is
simply a waste of time for both the end user and the tech support
person in most cases.  Most users (maybe not counting some single
computer windows users) don't go changing their settings on a whim if
something is already working.  I have no idea who got the idea that tech
support should assume that first when it really makes no sense.

</RANT>

Lennart Sorensen

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