[ale] OT: DeKalb Sets Public Meeting On Comcast

[Lightner, Jeff]

Of course it's not limited to Comcast.  I have a friend that went to work for one of the Satellite companies.  They did give them a few weeks of training before they put them on the floor but once they got to the floor it turned out they had trained them on only one of three internal systems required to do the job.  If they didn't train them on how to use their own tools I imagine they didn't train them very well for what was out in the field.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Michael B. Trausch
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 8:10 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: DeKalb Sets Public Meeting On Comcast

On 02/18/2010 04:51 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us
> <mailto:mike at trausch.us>> wrote:
>
>     trained to always blame the customer's wiring for any issue that
>     comes in to the help desk that isn't something stupidly trivial like an
>     email password reset.
>
>
> This was for a good reason: most of the problems for a LONG time were
> caused by crappy installations done by their own contractors. Ungrounded
> incoming connections are still very common.

I can understand that, though it doesn't make sense for a whole plethora 
of issues.  Packets being dropped at a backbone entry point would be one 
of those issues, high-latency pings beyond the first hop (but not _at_ 
the first hop) would be another.

The simple problem is that they don't want to pay enough to have people 
who actually know things about networking to support residential users. 
  A friend of mine works for a regional cable company in Ohio and they 
at least have the decency to make sure that their people know the basics 
of networking.  They may not know all the intricacies of IP networking, 
or how TCP and UDP work, but they know how the cable company's network 
works, they know that well, and they know the enough IP that they can 
look up what they don't know if the customer isn't able to explain it to 
them (or look it up to confirm what the customer is trying to explain to 
them).

They also know enough to know when their normal list of issues doesn't 
fit what's going on with the problem or issue being reported.  And they 
deal with it well.  As does, at least so far in my experience, the 
people who support Comcast's business class service.  Personally, I 
think all technical support personnel should be required to actually 
know how the things they support work, and not just have some sort of 
knowledge base or internal wiki that has "customer says this" followed 
by "you say that", ad infinitum.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475
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