The Clueful ISP Opportunity
Are we, beautiful denizens of the internet that we are, destined to spend our lives grovelling for a decent broadband connection? Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge question whether there really are decent ISPs out there, and if there are why they’re not rolling in money from the entire open source community.
117 Comments to “The Clueful ISP Opportunity”
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I live out in Idaho, a backwater of the US. I have used Qwest DSL for several years and found it to be reliable. When I did need support for a slow connection problem they handled it quickly and professionally.
I think we have a pretty good ISP – Sentex [http://sentex.ca]. We have only needed to call them 2-3 times in at least 7-8 years. I don’t know the the price or the maximum upload.download speed since my Dad’s company pays for it (I’m only 14). What I do know is that we get a static IP, a sub-domain poining to our IP, one free email account (with web-based access), a speed of 4.15 Mbps (the second highest speed they offer). I don’t know how much we can download but in the last month we have dowloaded 20.3901 GB and uploaded 8.5242 GB.
The short and simple answer to the question of “getting through to clueful support” is:
Don’t use the telephone support.
Basically, those who know how to diagnose the fault (be it sync, common PVC errors, PPP screwups or whatever) will find the root cause of the error and drop someone an email with as much relevant technical information they can cram in, with a suggested solution. Phone support just sucks – you can’t get through in one “magic” word that you know what you’re talking about, because some management executive is going to find out about the practice and use it themselves – and go insane when people get pissed off with him because they’ve bypassed the levels of cannon-fodder they’d built up in the Tier-1 support.
Having said all that, in my opinion the most clueful ISP I’ve seen are Andrews and Arnold (aaisp.net.uk) and if you take a Be line rather than a BT, you’re able to play with the remote side settings yourself. The staff are very knowledgeable, and process information quickly, concisely, and speak to you like a human being rather than a featureless blob on the end of the line.
I use Virgin Media myself, never had a problem – but I tend not to use it that much because I’m quite happy sitting on a 1Gbit stub at the office, and downloading my evil iTunes movie rentals at jiggabytes a second. Mwah hah hah.
Seriously though – if you have trouble with an ISP, it’s almost certainly not their fault, it’ll be a fault with BT’s network, or a temporary hickup on the ISP’s end. These are usually few and far between. Stick it out. Or pay hundreds of pounds a month for a leased line
Furthermore, just because you know how DHCP works and you know that turning your router off/on again won’t help, they still have to ask as >90% of the queries they get can be easily fixed with that solution. It weeds out the simple stuff so second tier support can concentrate on the more challenging stuff.
Just because you’re a wizzkid when it comes to computers doesn’t mean you know anything about networks. If you really want to get past first tier as quick as possible, answer their questions quickly and clearly, and be polite! Within a couple of minutes, you’ll be where you need to be.
Without a doubt, though, you’ll get the best service via email. It gives people a chance to look into things and not worry whether your call has been going on too long.
The smaller ISPs aren’t going to be able to offer unbundled ADSL and hence will always be more expensive, and reliant on BTs wholesale ADSL provision
As a technical user I do feel the frustration when contacting support but I would rather the network was monitored more closely and problems fixed without my assistance.
Could the next generation of cable/DSL modems have GSM/HDPA modems built in to 1) immediately report outages – so if they are at a street/exchange level an engineer can be sent out to fix it. 2) provide (a slow) backup service As ISPs want to be in the triple/quad play market then they probably already have good relations with mobile telcos – they pay for the data because it is their fault that the main service has failed.
Like Jono, I too have comcast. I am not so impressed with them as a company or as a service provider. Jono said that they usually don’t go down, which is true, but they are a utility. They are not supposed to go down. Sad as it may seem, cable TV and Internet have been elevated to utility status. Internet, all right. I can give that a pass, but cable TV being raised to the same level of importance as the telephone or gas or electricity?
Ok, so cable rarely fails. But when it does, what kind of response can you expect? The last time I had to call comcast, it was obviously an area wide outage. So what does the phone monkey do? They schedule a dispatch to my house with the stern warning that if it is my fault, I could be charged. I patiently explained that it was an outage in the neighborhood or more, and I half expected the support person to start asking me for my neighbors’ names and phone numbers so he could schedule dispatches to all of their houses…
That said, I think an ISP catering to tech-savvy people is a great idea. It would be nice not to have to start conversations with the support line by saying “I am a sysadmin/security engineer/network engineer/etc” and still having them walk me through basic troubleshooting that I did before calling them…
The bit that really sucks is when you have to pretend to be using Windows and be directly connected to the modem / router before they will even listen.
Its a couple of years ago now but I had the situation whit a large UK ISP that when I said I was using Linux they said that was not supported and they couldn’t fix the problem with their network until I connected a windows PC directly to the modem.
I phoned back and just lied to them till they accepted the fault.
I live in Israel, and we used to have that clueful ISP and it was called Actcom. It was the first commercial ISP in Israel and they were never big but always very clueful and helpful. For one thing they never practiced the horrible sales practices that all other ISPs here do where they sell you this packacge at a discount for X per month but if you don’t call in 9 months to renew the discount then your cost jumps to 3X.
Anyway their tech support was always rather not dumb, but if you dialed in and told them the magic word – which incidently is “I’m using Linux” – you immediately get someone very smart to talk with (relatively to ISP tech support obviously).
So why am I describing Actcom in a past sense? because they were never very big but they had a following in the tech community which probably appealed to commercial entities (educated people with disposabe income, etc.) and in the last round of consolidaions in the Israeli telecom market they were bought and absorbed by one of the larger, most annoying and clueless service provider.
That is probably the main problem with a clueless ISP – they can’t compete with the larger ISPs on the Average Joe market (not without dumbing down considerably) and they can’t survive independently.
I think the problem is that there are people who are technical, and people who think they are technical….
Best thing would be for the ISP to include a copy of their script in your welcome pack so that you can walk through the steps before you sit for 30 minutes on hold…
Hey, thanks for the mention!
One of the key drivers we find drives cost up for tech-friendly ISPs such as ourselves is that tech-savvy users also tend to be heavy bandwidth users. If you look at the likes of BT, for every 1 heavy user, they’ve probably got 50-100 other users that barely use their broadband at all. That averages out the costs really well, which is why they can drop their prices so low.
Almost every ISP works on the basis of hoping that people don’t heavily use their broadband service. One exception to this is AAISP as mentioned in one of the other comments. If you look at their charging structure, you soon get a feel for what it costs to run a ADSL service – particularly if you’re dependent on BT Wholesale to provide your ADSL tails.
Without trying to promote ourselves, I will point out that the costs on the front page of our website (as you mention in the podcast) are for exchanges where we can only offer BT. Where we are able to offer LLU based DSL, our prices suddenly become a lot more competitive.
Another big problem is that pretty much every wholesale DSL provider also has a consumer retail product on the same platform. They don’t really want to undercut their own product, so it’s not uncommon to see wholesale pricing the same as, or even more than, their own retail pricing.
Simon (Bogons)
Thanks for the detailed info! How can I find out whether I’m in one of these cheaper LLU areas?
Check your line at http://www.bogons.net/order_adsl.shtml it’ll show ADSL2+ LLU services where available
Another factor in ADSL pricing Simon didn’t mention is the widespread use of traffic shaping/DPI to manage traffic down. We don’t do that.
Brandon (Bogons)
I do a lot of work for SOHO, and oftentimes find that the problems a client faces lie with the ISP or the ISP’s equipment. So, client rings ISP, proves who they are, and hands over to me. At which point I tell them exactly what has been tried already, that I have done x, y and z and still the cable modem does not work, and this is what the cable modem says it is doing/not doing, and is there a report of an outage locally.
At this point tier 1 chap usually crumbles, puts me on hold, talks to manager and puts me through to someone else, who almost always asks me put put them back on to the client, who is told a new cable modem is on its way.
Fight the script by pre-empting it seems to be the answer AFAICS.
Doesn’t the ‘Magic Word Customer Support’ protocol (MWCSp), RFC tbc, just require some sort of handshake? You say “frobnitz!”, they ask “What is your IP address?” and the customer support ‘dialogue’ script can kick in:-
You reply “What’s that?” they move to “Have you turned it off and on aga…” in the tree, or
You reply “192.168.2.1″ they move straight to the “Can you ping …” part of the ‘dialogue’ tree, or
You reply with “Which one, my local router address, my dsl address, or the address of your shit dns server?” they throw away the script and start up a conversation.
I saw this ‘toon and instantly thought of this shot…
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service
Why do I use crappy ISP? Because Verizon owns the freaking pole in front of my apartment building!
I tried to get another DSL provider, but they are locked out of this area somehow (even though I don’t understand it all.) No cable provider here, so it is Verizon or dial-up.
I discovered by talking to telco people that Verizon will never let you talk to a technician, but if you pay more per month you can get a better phone monkey. That is just the way it is. I also discovered that the phone monkeys can only escalate two complaints out of their office, “connection slow,” or “connection down.” Last time I called I cut them off right when they started the script, by saying “No, we are not doing that. I know my basic DSL troubleshooting, and my connection is down. I want you to tell me that you have logged this and are escalating it.” To this the reply was “yes, sir,” and the connection was up in two hours.
I always thought asking you a random question when you called might be the answer… maybe even automate it, have a large and changing pool with of multiple choice questions with 9 possible answers or input the answer using the phone keypad.
not convinced that only having highly skilled, and therefore expensive “3rd line” support would save anyone money. The lower skilled “phone monkeys” are there to filter out the easy “cupholder” questions so that the more skilled people are using their time on the real problems.
Perhaps your real problem is that the first line scripts are not good enough. Apart from “frobnitz”, how would you change them?
So about every home in America today with broadband Internet also has a wireless AP. Maybe someone should hack around with some routing protocols and a lightweight distro like Tomato so ISPs are the backend transport and we can all sort of rely on someone in the neighborhood having working service.
I just had an amazing experience about getting to the higher level of discussion with tech support.
In this case it was an voice-over-IP service provider that themselves discovered in their logs that I was using asterisk.
I recently switched to Clearwire and while they have several issues to iron out, esp in my area (due for a local tower hardware upgrade in August). They have been the first ISP that I don’t have to pretend that I am on Windows. Most of the time when they ask what OS I use they comment “Great! . since you are using Linux, that cuts out several steps for us” (I even got one tech to give #! a try on his own laptop). They were even fairly helpful when I was having trouble setting up Amahi! The one tech that was a Windows only person was very savvy and knew what to do, but just had to ask me to do it on my own “I don’t know how to do this on Linux, but you need to go to the command line and,,,”. They do sub out their online tech chat though and I would not recommend using that option. my connection is about 2.5Mbps down and ,75Mbps up.