8 ms·

Former telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. Anything beyond that is irelevant to me. I don't know

by JensRex 10y ago

Former telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. Anything beyond that is irelevant to me. I don't know why he would trust customer equipment to run the test. I used one of these. http://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/products/network-test-and-certification/copper-dsl-wifi-and-broadband/smartclass-tps http://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/products/network-test-an... (* )I'm not sure what the english word is for that.

hueving 10y ago
>Former telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. That's only relevant if the complaint is about the connection from your home to the PoP. If the technician was sent out to solve an issue with the Internet being slow in general, he/she needs to actually find what the bottleneck is, not call it a day when some traffic makes it to a PoP.
- toast0 10y ago
  OTOH - the technician doesn't need to be at your house if you have a good connection to the PoP. Field technicians may not be trained in troubleshooting network beyond the PoP and likely don't have the right access to tools to make the changes that need to be made.
- walrus01 10y ago
  It's a stupid idea to do a truck roll to resolve upstream peering/transit/congestion issues with the IP network. The technician's job is to diagnose OSI layer 1/2 issues to your local DSLAM or CMTS.
  - dsl 10y ago
    Yet broadband providers continue to do it.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      Usually because a customer can't properly articulate on the phone what's wrong with their connection. Last mile broadband providers want to do as much as possible to avoid a site visit to a home. Unless they're charging $95 per visit one technician visit for 30 minutes can eat up all the profit from that customer for an entire year.
      - dsl 10y ago
        Again, you seem to be confusing what they should be doing with what they are actually doing.
        walrus01 10y ago
        sadly, I am... I work for an ISP that generally doesn't make these mistakes, our network engineering/operations/construction team enjoys observing all the stupid things Centurylink and Comcast do in our local market.
      - ryao 10y ago
        How much does your ISP charge you? Verizon managed to get $71.48 a month out of me on a connection that had been set up by a technician nearly 10 years prior before I got fed up. A technician visit at that rate would probably eat just 1 month of profit on a connection whose initial installation cost had been paid many times over. The reason that I got fed up was that they kept trying to get more. Nearly all of those years had involved a triple play, for which they had raised rates until they charged ~$162 a month. Sadly, I was not the one who negotiated with them. Had I been, I would have been fed up well before things became that bad. The $71.48 came after breaking the bundle I favor of an OTA antenna and VoIP. I managed to talk my way out of the ETF by telling a supervisor that the ETF was the same whether I cancelled all services or just 2 and that I was giving Verizon the chance to keep some business, provided that they reduced services to just the Internet connection and waived the ETF. The supervisor waived it. After breaking the bundle, I took over responsibility for such bills. I am paying Cablevision ~$45 a month now. Bandwidth is lower, but I reason that as long as bandwidth is high enough to deliver traffic with acceptable latencies, being able to burst higher does not matter that much. So far, things have been okay on both pricing and having a usable connection, despite a few initial goofs by Cablevision.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    With Time Warner, there is an absolutely impenetrable firewall between customer service and backend/upstream network engineering. Rolling a truck appears to be the absolute ceiling on what a call center employee can do.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      This is unfortunate, but I can sort of understand why. Customers are frequently mistaken on what's wrong with their connection, example, the customer thinks they're seeing 0.5% packet loss and high jitter consistently to something that's 3 hops upstream of their default gateway, when in fact there's something messed up in their home Wifi which is on channel 1 the same as their four neighbors. It takes a lot of time (time = money) to train first tier customer service reps how to recognize what needs to be escalated to the people who have 'enable' on the network equipment 2 to 4 hops upstream of a typical cablemodem/DSL customer. And then the management decision to empower them to do so if necessary. And a method for the NOC of filtering through the crap to discover that "Yes, this customer really has discovered some service impacting issue that has not been automatically reported by our NMS".

by JensRex 10y ago

hueving 10y ago

>Former telephone technician(* ) here. What I'm interested in is the connection from your home to our PoP. That's only relevant if the complaint is about the connection from your home to the PoP. If the technician was sent out to solve an issue with the Internet being slow in general, he/she needs to actually find what the bottleneck is, not call it a day when some traffic makes it to a PoP.

toast0 10y ago
OTOH - the technician doesn't need to be at your house if you have a good connection to the PoP. Field technicians may not be trained in troubleshooting network beyond the PoP and likely don't have the right access to tools to make the changes that need to be made.
walrus01 10y ago
It's a stupid idea to do a truck roll to resolve upstream peering/transit/congestion issues with the IP network. The technician's job is to diagnose OSI layer 1/2 issues to your local DSLAM or CMTS.
- dsl 10y ago
  Yet broadband providers continue to do it.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Usually because a customer can't properly articulate on the phone what's wrong with their connection. Last mile broadband providers want to do as much as possible to avoid a site visit to a home. Unless they're charging $95 per visit one technician visit for 30 minutes can eat up all the profit from that customer for an entire year.
    - dsl 10y ago
      Again, you seem to be confusing what they should be doing with what they are actually doing.
      - walrus01 10y ago
        sadly, I am... I work for an ISP that generally doesn't make these mistakes, our network engineering/operations/construction team enjoys observing all the stupid things Centurylink and Comcast do in our local market.
    - ryao 10y ago
      How much does your ISP charge you? Verizon managed to get $71.48 a month out of me on a connection that had been set up by a technician nearly 10 years prior before I got fed up. A technician visit at that rate would probably eat just 1 month of profit on a connection whose initial installation cost had been paid many times over. The reason that I got fed up was that they kept trying to get more. Nearly all of those years had involved a triple play, for which they had raised rates until they charged ~$162 a month. Sadly, I was not the one who negotiated with them. Had I been, I would have been fed up well before things became that bad. The $71.48 came after breaking the bundle I favor of an OTA antenna and VoIP. I managed to talk my way out of the ETF by telling a supervisor that the ETF was the same whether I cancelled all services or just 2 and that I was giving Verizon the chance to keep some business, provided that they reduced services to just the Internet connection and waived the ETF. The supervisor waived it. After breaking the bundle, I took over responsibility for such bills. I am paying Cablevision ~$45 a month now. Bandwidth is lower, but I reason that as long as bandwidth is high enough to deliver traffic with acceptable latencies, being able to burst higher does not matter that much. So far, things have been okay on both pricing and having a usable connection, despite a few initial goofs by Cablevision.
- superuser2 10y ago
  With Time Warner, there is an absolutely impenetrable firewall between customer service and backend/upstream network engineering. Rolling a truck appears to be the absolute ceiling on what a call center employee can do.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    This is unfortunate, but I can sort of understand why. Customers are frequently mistaken on what's wrong with their connection, example, the customer thinks they're seeing 0.5% packet loss and high jitter consistently to something that's 3 hops upstream of their default gateway, when in fact there's something messed up in their home Wifi which is on channel 1 the same as their four neighbors. It takes a lot of time (time = money) to train first tier customer service reps how to recognize what needs to be escalated to the people who have 'enable' on the network equipment 2 to 4 hops upstream of a typical cablemodem/DSL customer. And then the management decision to empower them to do so if necessary. And a method for the NOC of filtering through the crap to discover that "Yes, this customer really has discovered some service impacting issue that has not been automatically reported by our NMS".