I once had an @home rep insist that my connection was down because there was ice in the lines. No matter how many times I told him it was 58 degrees outside he stuck to his guns and insisted that was the problem. Richey -----Original Message----- From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:smb@cs.columbia.edu] Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 3:35 PM To: Joe Greco Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support On Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:10:13 -0600 (CST) Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
I did ask, and all the local people are, in fact, local. It's a matter of training and technical knowledge. None of them was really putting together the fact that the modem was sketchy for the service class we had.
Yup -- I've had similar fun with Comcast. Once, I was seeing 15-20% packet loss on the local loop and 90% (you read that correctly) packet duplication. The advice I received translated to "clear your IE browser cache". I demurred, and I was told that (a) generally, performance problems were solvable that way, and (b) 15% packet loss was pretty good. I escalated... Then there was the time they upgraded the firmware in my cable modem/NAT to a buggy release that didn't understand the activity timer in the NAT table. Every 30 minutes, like clockwork, my ssh sessions would die. I had to try to explain that to someone who didn't know how to spell IP, let alone TCP. Oh yes -- judging from their accents, everyone I spoke with was American. In both cases, once I reached the clueful people, things were resolved pretty quickly. (Well, not the packet duplication; that took *weeks* to resolve, but once the packet loss problem was solved I could at least get decent throughput.)
My point is that you not only need the language skills and a good phone connection, but also a reasonable process to deal with knowledgeable people. I understand the need to provide scripted support, but there should also be a reasonable path to determine that someone has an exceptional problem and isn't being well-served by the script.
Customer records often include an optional data field that says things about particular customers. I heard a story -- and I'll leave out the names, since it's second- or third-hand and it does involve people and companies most of us know -- that one very clueful person's record had a note saying more or less "if you don't understand what he's saying, he's right and you're wrong, and you should route his call immediately to Tier N, where N is large"... But getting on that list is the hard part. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb