Rogers high-speed internet

[Michael MacLeod]

On 1/23/07, William O'Higgins Witteman <william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> The key is that there is no requirement for Rogers to allow resellers,
> so you have to deal with Rogers.  This is a dealbreaker.  I always get
> 500kb/s, I have a static IP, my tech support (called four times in two
> years) knows Linux, and I can run whatever servers I want, and it costs
> $34 per month, tax in, total.  I'm with Teksavvy.
>
> With an ISP you want two things in terms of service (and in Terms of
> Service, when it comes to that):
>
> 1. tech support with a clue and reasonable policies
> 2. clout when it comes to dealing with the underlying carrier - a
> reseller's business is much more valuable to BellNexxia than your
> individual business is to any corporate entity.
>

I currently work for a third party telecommunications company in tech
support, and not all techs are made equal. Having worked in tech support, I
can tell you that I will *always* call right back if my first call didn't
satisfy my problem. Chances are, you'll get a different tech who will be
competent. It seems to be this way with everyone in the business, and it's
not necessarily the companies' fault. Hiring and training good tech support
staff is hard and expensive, and keeping them is even harder. The good ones
of course tend to get promoted out of tech support and into the internal IT
department or to the NOC, which is also a drain on talent in the tech
support department. It's kinda the mail room of the 21st century.

I've personally had terrible techs at both Bell and Rogers, but also some
very decent techs at both companies as well. I've managed to speak to tier 2
techs at both companies, and found them to be very knowledgeable. Both seem
to be a crapshoot on tier 1, but the tier 2 techs have a future and a
salary, and do a decent job. The useless tier 1 technicians are there to
help the majority of useless customers. While you may be a very
knowledgeable linux user, the majority of the calls these people get are
outright crazy. People filtering their modems not the phones, people trying
to plug their computer into the box the modem came in (I'm not kidding, I've
seen that). But, if you can keep a tier 1 technician on the phone for about
15 minutes, they're past their 'average call resolution time' and wont mind
doing up a ticket and sending you to a second level tech in order to keep
their call times down. Level one is essentially there to make sure the
second level doesn't have to deal with blazing idiots and simple problems.

As for the 'sharing the internet with the neighbourhood' claim, John
Macdonald got it right earlier that it's merely a claim that's not as true
as it used to be. But anyone who's done tech support for a VoIP service will
certainly be able to find you examples where it's true today. Standard
troubleshooting for intermittent quality problems should always include "are
there specific times of the day where the quality is bad? For instance, is
it okay during the daytime but get bad around 3:30 or 4:00 and start getting
better again around 9:30 or 10:00?". Believe me, it still happens.

The problem with third party ISP's running through Bell Nexxia, is that you
have another layer of corporation between you and someone who can fix your
problem. Since the third party companies can't send out their own
technicians, they have to book appointments with Bell to send out Entourage
technicians to fix your problem. And I'm pretty sure Bell will deal with
their own problems first. Plus, you're still at the mercy of any labour
disputes between Entourage and Bell.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20070123/79c81179/attachment.html>