Now, that i'm not in the ISP business -- *all* large ISPs have the same "small" problem, namely the complete lack of understanding of the current workforce market by the management. There are only few people in the world who really know how the global routing works, and some of them already worth more than average Joe Banana telco tech will make for his entire life. Needless to say that they don't work for telcos, so those who still do have something to think about. In my practice, leaving a large ISP by members of engineering or operational staff causes rather steep increases in their income. On the other hand, engineers having compensation bigger than their managers is something unheard of in the telco corporate culture, and so is trusting engineers to do planning, without the "benefit" of last-year-plus-five-percent beancounting. Those who stay are either young enough to work just for fun, or have other reasons (immigration status, etc) to stay. Of course, incompetents tend to stay till pensions. --vadim PS Although i post from a Sprint accound i do not work or speak Sprint.
From list-admin@merit.edu Wed Dec 20 02:53:59 1995 Received: from merit.edu (merit.edu [35.1.1.42]) by titan.sprintlink.net (8.6.9/8.6.9) with ESMTP id CAA27552 for <avg@titan.sprintlink.net>; Wed, 20 Dec 1995 02:53:58 -0500 Received: from pike.ixa.net (nikm@pike.ixa.net [199.242.19.1]) by merit.edu (8.6.12/merit-2.0) with ESMTP id CAA22222 for <nanog@merit.edu>; Wed, 20 Dec 1995 02:19:40 -0500 Received: (from nikm@localhost) by pike.ixa.net (8.7.3/8.6.11) id XAA13404; Tue, 19 Dec 1995 23:15:57 -0800 (PST) Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 23:15:57 -0800 (PST) From: Nikos Mouat <nikm@ixa.net> To: William Allen Simpson <bsimpson@morningstar.com> cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Service Problems In-Reply-To: <4648.bsimpson@morningstar.com> Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951219230848.13375B-100000@pike.ixa.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: R
On the other hand, I have been very pleased with MCI NOC. Yes, MCI has some problems too, but they even CALLED BACK to let me know when _another_ provider (PSI) had fixed the problem that I reported, rather than me trying again every 10 minutes to see if it was fixed yet. That kind service overwhelmed me with joy and brought tears to my eyes!
If it makes you feel better, I put in a trouble ticket with MCI approx 29hours ago. it was not a complete outage, but the problem i was trying to talk to a tech about had an hour or so prior caused a serious outage on my mci connection - I would prioritize it as important, not urgent. the person who took the trouble ticket asked me if it would be "ok to take the circuit down for testing" - the problem i was trying to get resolved was related to peering.. go figure.. I still haven't heard back from MCI.. UUNET on the other hand I managed to get a call through to a tech there immediately... I've given up on trying to get through to MCI.. I've had nothing but good experience with them on the physical circuit level.. and the routing guys installing the circuit were great.. but trying to get a [routing] tech on the phone for trouble issues just sucks.