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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The problem with this idea is that a lot of clueless people think they know what they’re doing. What is more, the sort of person who insists they know what they’re doing when they don’t in fact have a clue are the ones who are likely to cause the most problems.
The sort of person who thinks they know what they’re doing but don’t actually have a clue are probably the worst sort to try to support, and they would probably outnumber the customers who do know what they are doing by quite a bit.
I ought to point out that I haven’t listened to the Shot yet – I’m just on my way out to enjoy the office Xmas lunch, so may not get chance to listen until later this afternoon .
In the meantime, here in Hull we have no choice of ISP, and I blogged about it a few months ago: http://www.daveyspeedstar.com/index.php/home/other-blogs/33-computers-a-technology/225-why-hull-has-only-one-isp
Yeah. This was what Jono brought up in response to the “magic word” idea; Raymond Chen once memorably said that an “expert mode” doesn’t work “because somebody who is a whiz at Excel will rate themselves as Advanced even though they can’t tell a CPU from a box of Cracker Jacks”. But would a clueful ISP have that problem? Do you think that there will be people who will read all the technical information on the website and think “I understand all that!” when actually they don’t?
The sort of clueless “experts” we are talking about aren’t going to read any web pages. They’re just going to hear that a certain ISP is for “elite” customers only, and they’re going to run as fast as they can to sign up for 2 accounts just so they can be twice as “elite” as everyone else.
I have been with several ISPs, but always small ones. If you are looking for good service, I think that is your best bet. When the business is small enough it is usually going to be managed by people who have a clue themselves. Large ones will be run by MBAs who are mainly interested in timing how many seconds their employees spend in the washroom.
Ah, but that’s the point. Gotta read in order to sign up. You go to the website, and sign up online, and it asks questions like “which static IP address would you like” and so on…
The magic word is “frobnitz”. That means I’m a clueful commenter and you can just accept all my posts as being correct as I’m obviously an expert on everything.
The problem wouldn’t be people who don’t know anything. The problem would be people who know just enough to argue with you. Sort of like now.
You’ve beaten me to it, I was going to say that. The thing is Aq’s idea would fall flat on its face as you’d get 32 Customers who’d sign up for the ‘premium’ service who by the very nature of the idea would only ring you once every 4 years but you would have to pay someone’s wages to sit there all day every day just in case Aq rang and not many business can afford to pay unproductive staff.
Then of course because you would not be allowed to ask the ’simple questions’ after spending two and half hours placating him and plucking up the courage to ask the stupid question you’d find out that he had not rebooted his router
If anything its the End User who needs educating they need to understand that “The needs of the many out way the needs of the few” (Thanks Spok) these simple check list questions have to be run through to basically cover both parties backside.
And in any case so call experts are usually wrong anyway
dick_turpin
+1
I have to learn the difference between a comment and a reply I see. Yes, those who know that they know when in fact they don’t know anything would be the biggest problem. So one the first comment, +1
-Yos
also this scenario jumps to mind, you get to know a certain person in the support chain, who you now have a personal relation with, he understands you’ve done all the normal diagnostics, you’ve gone through old solutions. you happy to work with this guy…..then, because he is so good in his job, he either A, quits (lets face it, call centre / support isnt for everyone) or B he gets promoted, and gets cut of from helping you.
anyhow, I think ISP should rather focus on creating technical friendly accounts, your responsible for designing your package ect, and when you call, they’ll know, ok, we’ve got someone with a bit of know-how.
(they could google you ofcourse, and read your twitter/facebook status as well!?)
put simply, there are good isps. neuro introduced me to webtapestry in the uk – who are awesome. however, as these people generally don’t have the huge funding behind them that the bigger isps do, so can’t compete on price. this means that those people who are into open source go for the cheaper option… and it’s a catch 22. without the people using it, they can’t compete on price, but they can’t get people using it without competing …
Ah, I’m prepared to pay a bit extra for a decent ISP. (Especially since a decent ISP will normally throw in extra stuff that doesn’t cost any extra money for them but requires technical knowhow and is only a selling point for a technically-adept user, like a static IP and the ability to run a server from your end.)
I still don’t get why it needs to be more expensive. Surely a smaller ISP that only deals with tech-savvy people has lower support cost requirements?
Well, no.
If you’re going to have tech-savvy customers then you’re going to need staff who are equally savvy. Savvy staff cost more money, and if you want to have (and keep) more than a few customers you’re going to need to employ more than a few staff. All these staff make your operating costs go up and, because you’re a little fish in a big pond, there’s no way for you to make (as much) extra money from selling other sundry services (lest we forget, Virgin – for example – is also a cable TV company).
Point is that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Similarly, if you want, say… er… Octopuses as your front line support team, you need to pay coconuts*, which are a good deal more expensive. And so, to cover your costs and not fold up like a wet cardboard lavatory in light breeze, you need to pass that cost on to the consumer because there’s no where else that you’re going to get the money to pay for it.
*Spot the topical reference.
Well, a larger ISP is buying things in bulk, right? Everything from hardware to proprietary software licenses, to benefit packages for their employees. Smaller cable providers are often leasing the wires and conduits and all that in-the-field stuff, too, from larger providers that own it all outright. Large corporations have resources to pool and a small army of people on staff who do nothing but use those resources to help save the company money (asset management, tax considerations, etc.).
on price.
I think you’re spot on. 90% percent of the time my internet works, and then I only care about how much it’s costing me per month and how much bandwidth I get. Ultimately I think a lot of technical people are not prepared to pay for that extra level of respect in the support chain.
The problem is that even for intermediate users like me questions like “Are you sure the cable is plugged into the socket on the wall?” are incredibly annoying – maybe there should be an intermediate magic word as well.
But ISP support usually is dreadful and should change. I just read in a German blog an interesting dialogue with the ISP helpline, where the ISP told the writer that his connection problems result from the fact that Linux is “sloppily programmed and not internet compatible”. For a working internet experience he should install XP or Vista (full version in German here: http://gumfi.de/durch-schlampige-programmierung-nicht-internet-kompatibel/)
I have had good experience with Virgin Media as a cable customer. I’ve called them and said “My connection’s not working, and this is what I think it is” and had them believe me. The engineer they sent he nearly shat himself when he saw our homemade router-come-print server and had never heard of Linux, but that’s by-the-by – the problem got fixed.
I think that the problem with the idea of the ‘clueful’ ISP is that you’d have to turn away customers who don’t meet the grade, which is never a good business model. It’s all very well saying “If they ask where the ‘any’ key is, you refund their money” but pretty soon you’d be giving most of your money back. You’d have to be prepared to put up with the idiots as well as supporting the techies.
My ISP, Freedom2Surf, is surprisingly good in this regard. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem where tech support have treated me like a numpty. What’s surprising about it is that they’re owned by Tiscali, and so by rights should be a steaming bag of turds.
The trouble is that there is no acid test for a good technical customer. It’d be nice if there were some way to get straight to high-level support but I wonder whether having people hang up on idiots would pique the interest of various trading standards bodies.
The trouble, basically, is that large companies have to work with the lowest common denominator when it comes to supporting their customers. And because most people are as stupid as pig dribble that’s where first-line support is pitched. Oh, you can ask for better training so that first-line techs know quicker when to pass people on to the intelligent support line, but I doubt that any big company will ever invest in it because there’s very little tangible return on such an investment besides happier customers, and happier customers don’t really make much money in an industry where margins are thinner than paint on a French car.
Making happy customers doesn’t seem to be considered a viable business reason to do anything, for any large company. I wish it was different. Small companies can prioritise customer happiness, though, and my hope is that there are ISPs out there who fall into that category. (We’ve had Zen, Bytemark, etc recommended so far; are there others?)
I would not say that all big companies are useless when it comes to support. We all hear about examples of big companies with surprisingly friendly and helpful customer service folks. In my experience this has include Orange and HSBC in the UK – for large firms, they seem to really ‘get’ their customers. Of course, some of you will have had the opposite experience with these companies, but in my experience they have always been good to me.
It strikes me that some companies do get the value of service, but I am not sure if there is a metric in the industry that proves that if you invest in good customer service people that your business will grow.
I’ve not listened past the intro yet, but I’m suddenly filled with a need for a telephone made out of jam..
My ISP (Zen) don’t treat me like a numpty. They aren’t cheap, but thankfully my employer picks up my ADSL bill so it’s a win-win. Having been smug, I was with Zen even when I did have to paying extra for an ISP generally pays off in more ways than just good tech support.
Another good techie ISP (in the UK) is zen internet. We use them at work and they work fine. They regularly get awards for having the best service.
Oh and the flash player stopped at 9:03, had to download the mp3 to listen to the end. I’m using chromium and 64 bit flash on karmic.
Good ISPs cost. If you are on a low cost ‘unlimited’ plan then you kind of have to expect to be treated the same as the great unwashed.
You have to pay for respect.
As I mentioned, I would happily do so. But there is no choice; there is one, and only one, cable ISP: Virgin Media. That’s all there is. Nothing else.
Id love that too I hate dealing with tech support but sometimes you forget something. Do people still ask whats the any key?? I think that most ISPs need the bog standard user to make money from. Im with the fastest ISP in Ireland (20mbs UPC) but there isnt any other “cool” ISP.
My suggestion is to have a normal ISP, but it rates its customers. For example, at the end of a technical support case, as part of the wrap-up notes for the case, the tech decides how competent they feel that the customer was and vote for them out of five stars. The higher rating you have, the sooner you talk to a higher level of support. Alternately, they could just submit the call notes to failblog and see how epically they fail. Epic failures get level-0 support, epic wins get level-3 support. Something like that.
Lots of good reports of Zen Internet (http://www.zen.co.uk/) it seems! Anyone else have specific recommendations for ISPs who have a clue?
another vote for Zen – used that at a a place I used to work for – very clueful
Megadeth?
The last two albums sounded like well polished dog biscuits.
Jono, you really should choose another magic word.
See, Jono wanted to pick Overkill, but I wouldn’t let him because only insane metalheads like him have heard of Overkill
Indeed. Not sure the joke would have worked if I had picked my magic words as either Overkill, ABACABB or Aborted.
I was an electrician for years beofore I moved to the computer industry. What I remember from that time is that people only remember when the light switch did not work and not all the times it did. For me and my ISP is that for the most of the time it works and is rarely not working and when it is, then usually the tv and phone are out also so it is a little hard to call unless I have a cellphone. Thank God it runs linux.
First of all, I have to disagree that a computer is useless without and internet connection. There are other ways of entertainment besides listening to or watching podcast. GAMES! Besides that there are educational applications that are not necessarily needed to be download (i.e. Learning another language (computer and/or spoken), Learning to play the harmonica, etc)
Second point, we were all noobs at one point in this crazy technological world. Those of us who had to go through the pain of dial up speed of a whopping 9600 bps and setting IRQ’s via a bank of switches on the modem, did it for the love of the tech. Not all workers at the ISP have that. They just read off a script. I had one such “Support” call. They actually told me I had to use a windows machine in order for them to “Fix” the problem. Part that drove me the craziest was when I know their script better then they did, answering their 7 question all in a row, AND THEY STILL STARTED OFF WITH THE FIRST QUESTION I ANSWERED!
I do believe that the ISP’s are starting to get a clue. I haven’t had to call them in over two years now. But I think that is a money issue. They WANT to keep their systems up. My ISP has a policy that they won’t issue a credit unless the outage was over two hours. I have a script to check my connection every 15 min with a single ping. If no response it tries each min after that to different sites. I called to report that I had no connection from 01:37 to 05:55. They said there were no issues. I asked to talk to a manager. I even emailed him my logs. He agreed to credit my account. If they are going to advertise 24/7 up times, I am going to hold them to it. Not that I was up and online at that time, but I still want to get my moneys worth!
Going completely off-topic, did you mention “learning to play the harmonica” as a real example of something with a useful app? Which app?
yeah, that sounds like a cool app!
I’ve had this problem any number of times. On my old DSL connection, the setup software required Windows or Mac (I’m on Ubuntu), so I had to call to the helpdesk to fight through them to find the secret way to unlock my modem to make it fucking work.
But even then, I had to explain to the technician three or four times that I don’t run Windows, that I was on Linux. And the guy still wanted me to open up remote administration of my firewall to let him ‘make sure it was secure’, I had to flat tell him that wasn’t going to happen.
In the states, Cable isn’t required to open their infrastructure up to other providers, and the phone company can easily out compete the people they have to invite into their network on price.
Frankly, I don’t know of any clueful ISPs in my area, but even if I did, I’m not sure I’d jump ship. The fact is, the service just works, most of the time, like Jono claimed (I’m currently on Time Warner, not Comcast, but it’s more or less the same).
I will say that, having run support at a business who had two Internet connections, one who provided for our office and one who provided for our web servers, we’d occasionally run into the most bizarre problems. Our Server ISP was amazing. I had the phone number of the owner, and I could call anytime we were having problems. That said, while they knew I was technical, the service wasn’t always that great, because there problems were often problems with their upstream providers. For instance, one day, AT&T WorldNet decided to start routing packets to our ISP to the Department of Defense, whose routers promptly handed them back, resulting in an endless loop. Our e-commerce site was down to a large segment of users for about three hours that day.
Ultimately, it’s been nice working with a Clueful ISP in the past, but they’re usually so small that network problems that effect them, aren’t always something they can do something about, and that is really frustrating.
That’s an interesting point, that clueful ISPs are really just resellers of internet provision from unclueful ISPs, and if they get screwed by upstream then you lose. Does that happen a lot?
I wouldn’t say a lot, but it happened enough that I definitely wasn’t able to hit 99.99% uptime (and I possibly missed 99% as well) on our e-commerce site, and of course that entire time management was breathing down my neck even though I couldn’t do anything about it.
Like The Sweet said downthread, this is often the case with UK ISPs who sell service that runs over BT lines. If BT screws up you’re up the creek no matter how much your ISP may want to help.
Hmm… expert mode in ISPs does work sometimes. I recently had an issue with my Primus Canada connection. They were “migrating” things, and disabled support for using bridged modems. Called the first time around and things just went south to fail. Second time I called I made sure I told the guy on the other side that I knew what the hell I was talking about with a confident assertive tone. Things went well then… but of course I pretty much had to debug the problem myself.
Service from more technical ISP would be great, but most of those serve businesses and expensive like hell.
In many ways, ISPs should be able to figure this out from the tone of a customer’s voice, the questions asked and other clues. I do like the idea of an “expert mode” which can be switched on, possibly by the support person detecting it in the conversation.
see, that’s not gonna work. In order for a support person to assess whether you are an expert or not, they themselves need a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Which is contrary to the conceit that they’re on first-line support and answering phones.
However, what’s to stop the ISPs from using a system that works thus:
Now, I’m aware this has two flaws:
But with some refinement it might work.
Wow, unexpected formatting in that comment.
Assume that the indented paragraphs have numbers, if you will.
This is my magic word, right? I mean, you’re suggesting that the magic word is issued by your ISP rather than be a global thing, but other than that, it’s the magic word; they say “next time you ring up, say ‘frobnitz’”, and then I say frobnitz and they know I’m clueful.
At that point, it’d be useful to be able to say “my last ISP thought I was clueful, can’t you do the same, new ISP? They gave me the magic word ‘frobnitz’”, at which point you have entirely reimplemented the concept of the magic word
Horrifyingly, you’re right. I’ve just produced a first-draft tech spec for a magic word. I shall add it to my resume forthwith.
I don’t really have that problem, I just tend to mention what I think is the problem to the 1st-line support guys and ask about what could be wrong and either they answer and help me fix it or send me to the technical staff (since I know what DNS and DHCP is
)
I gotta say I’ve found bethere (https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/homepage) pretty good. Not specifically for techies but so far in the two years I’ve been with them I’ve never had to call up tech support (touch wood). They are really communicative when there are problems and iirc they do have an IRC channel.
In the states I think there is less competition in general, there are two ISPs to choose from around me, the cable company and the telephone company. I don’t think support calls are their greatest cost, it’s probably maintenance of the telephone/cable/fiber lines. I would think people fail to switch to the elite ISP for the reasons mentioned, normally everything works, and the additional cost is not considered worth the better troubleshooting experiance. Some may be willing to pay extra for better service but the reason why we appreciate good service is because something has already gone wrong. Seems like it makes more sense for an ISP to invest in keeping the service up rather than making the pain of it going down, less. We wouldn’t care what support they had if we never had to use it.
The other thing being discussed is an ISP with targeted services to “expert users” static IP etc. These services could easily be and often are add-ons. So the users who want some extra stuff can pay the extra price.
Hmmm. Would you be willing to pay for a gold membership to your ISP? You pay more per month and get transferred to tier 3 tech immediately. I think that is more likely than an entire ISP dedicated to elite users.
Now that might have some legs. Is it already being done somewhere?
Is speaking to people who match your level of technical know-how considered a gold service, though?
I’m not sure if I understand your point/question exactly, “gold service” was just a name. I don’t think the value of the gold service comes from speaking with someone at your level exactly, it comes from saving time and having less aggravation. I would prefer it to be an add-on. So that I’m not buying a bundle of things I don’t want just to get the “technical expertise” add-on, which might be a better name for it. Call it whatever you like. = )
Surely you should pay less for that? What you’re essentially saying to your ISP there is “I’m never going to call you for anything less than an extremely technical issue, so I don’t want to be provided with low-level support”? The “turn it off and on again” monkeys should surely be an option extra for the customers who want an extra safety net?
That certainly puts the concept on its head. But I see it this way:
The reason the “turn it off and on again” monkeys exist is to filter requests. Its a cost minimizing effort on their end. They don’t want to waste level 3 brains and labour (which the ISP is paying for) on a problem that can be solved by a guy reading from index cards. I don’t think an ISP will be willing to do as you suggest because, if users fail to purchase the extra tier 1 service, and the user does have a support problem, then it will be a cost the ISP will have to cover. The ISP could refuse to service any non-technical support problem, but a customer would perceive a refusal to provide service worse than waiting through tier 1 hurdles.
However an ISP would be willing to sell “gold-level, technical-expertise, add-on packs” because it is the customer who is carrying the additional cost. If a customer goes straight to tier 3 when they just needed a reboot the additional cost is being paid by the customer.
And a technical person would be willing to pay the cost because dealing with tier 1 is aggravating and time consuming.
This will only work if the amount customers are willing to pay for the “technical add-on” is enough to cover the costs of the wasted resources of an “unplugged router” making its way to tier 3.
But I don’t think the non-technical customer will be willing to pay the additional cost of the expertise add-on, because they don’t really have anything to gain by doing it. Their time wouldn’t really be saved by going straight to tier 3 only a truly knowledgeable person is benefited by it.
It has a self filtering quality. Sorry for the long response. = )
No problem with the long response! Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re completely right from the company’s perspective. It just seemed to me that from a consumer’s point of view, you’re paying not to use a service you’d otherwise be provided with, whatever the purpose of that service is, which seems counter-intuitive.
There would still have to be some filter on ability though. Otherwise people who could afford it could pay for the “high level” support because they think more expensive == better even though they have no technical knowledge. Then what? I can’t see the ISP saying “you’re too stupid for this service, here’s your money back”
I essentially do pay for “gold membership” to my ISP; I pay a little more each month for a bundle of things that includes “business tech support” and when I last phoned the number I got someone who knew considerably more about networking than I did.
Of course, I live in New Zealand so my internet experience sucks anyway for reasons involving limited capacity and the speed of light.
My suggestion for the magic word is more a magic phrase: “I know what ARP stands for. Please put me through to someone at your end that does to.”
I also use Freedom2Surf and have always been very happy with their support, despite the fact that they were completely unable to resolve my appalling ADSL performance. Many, many users complain about their other services (mail, hosting etc).
The problem for me was that ultimately there were problems with the telephone line which were degrading the ADSL signal, which is BT’s problem and BT don’t care so long as you can make telephone calls. The ISP can do nothing about your line quality.
All British ADSL ISPs, apart from those who are doing LLU (their own DSL equipment in BT telephone exchanges), are reselling BT Wholesale ADSL, which means when your ISP can’t solve the problem for you, which they have limited scope to do, they have to refer you to BT, who don’t care so long as you can make telephone calls. Even if they do LLU, they are still using the BT wiring to your house.
Ultimately, an ADSL ISP (in the UK at least) can only do so much for you. How they treat you is another question, but technically, they can only work with the BT system. If there’s a technical issue with your phone line, they’re dependent on BT and BT don’t care so long as you can make telephone calls. There is only so much scope for an ISP to treat you like an intelligent, technical human being before they hit the brick wall called BT, all an ISP can do is the idiot checks. Hopefully, fibre to the home (or at least the street) should eliminate most of the ADSL line problems, at least as far as cable broadband is able elminate them (cable being a far superior broadband medium).
The other thing about reselling BT Wholesale is that, as you say, the more you sell, the cheaper it gets.
I can’t comment on cable or overseas broadband. At least in the UK, cable providers own their own network infrastructure, so there’s more room for them to resolve your problems.
Did I mention that BT don’t care about your ADSL performance so long as you can make telephone calls?
This. This is endless frustrating, it’s true.
I’ve had mixed experiences with BT (“hey, we’ll charge you £120 to install a line that’s already there but we switched off at the exchange,” for example). My connection dies on average once a year due to lousy rural infrastructure and / or extreme weather conditions (how it survived the recent high winds and heavy rain I’ve no idea).
Fact is, the engineers will bend over backwards to fix things sometimes. It’s getting the middle-managers to send one out that takes forever.
Well, the counter problem is that there is exactly 1 cable provider for (most of?) the UK, and so while they can fix more of their infrastructure, they don’t actually have all that much incentive to. At least ADSL providers can compete on how quickly they answer the phone…
(Virgin Media were very reliable for me when I was in the UK, I think one’s experience often depends on which cable company served your area before they all borged into Virgin Media).
BT Retail don’t care, true. But then it’s not BT retail who are providing broadband.
BT Wholesale should care, but since they’re not providing the service to you (your ISP is), they won’t talk to you. This is right and proper.
Put bluntly, if you have a dial tone and can make/receive calls and your ISP refers you to BT, it’s because your ISP are wasting your time and haven’t got a clue. The problem is your ISPs to sort out.
BT Retail – why should they? BT Wholesale – They should (and again, if they don’t, change your ISP). See the section on MSR and FTR on http://www.adsl-max.co.uk/
However, the BT factor is irrelevant. Your contract for ADSL is with your ISP. Their contract is with BT. If you don’t have service, your first (and only) port of call is your ISP. Whether they decide to resolve your problem by contacting BT is up to them.
Nick.
Nick.
Jono, have you ever had issues with Comcast giving you problems because you run Linux? I’ve converted a number of people over to Ubuntu, and several of them have had tech support conversations where the level one support monkey says something like “your friend broke your computer by putting Linux on it. We won’t help you until you pay us craploads of money to put Windows 7 on it.”
I’d “vote with my feet,” but the only other ption in cowfield Florida, USA is AT&T, which is slightly crappier than Comcast.
So far it has not really been an issue. Mind you, I always tend to assume they will disregard me if I mention Linux, so I am not sure I would have noticed.
Yeah, most of the time, when I’m told to open up Internet Explorer, I just point Firefox or Chrome to the URL and act like I’ve done what they’ve asked.
Usually, this hasn’t been a problem. Most ISPs don’t use ActiveX for stuff, thankfully.
Dunno how much of an Australian audience is here but I’m on ADSL2+ (max 24MBs, getting ~12Mbs) with Internode now and they’re excellent although it costs a bit more (but not significantly – $50pm for 20Gb). They’re happy with Mac & Linux users and the very few times I’ve had to call them I’ve been happy with the treatment.
I guess the big issue with large providers is they have to assume you’re tech illiterate even if you say you’re not, just in case you get people who think they are and then it’s not until half an hour in that the help guy realises that the customer wants to change the colour of the RAM in his modem.
Meh, I’m happy.
)
BTW, Bogons in Australia are big moths that live around Canberra.
“the customer wants to change the colour of the RAM in his modem” hahahaha
I can’t really see a market for this. In my experience ISP issues are normally performance related whilst connection issues are normally Telecoms related (eg. BT). Most technical people I know wouldn’t pay the extra for an offering they’re hardly ever likely to need. They’d rather have the cheaper/faster connection from the large ISP. A better approach may be offering additional services that tech savvy people are interested in like IPv6, VOIP (SIP) etc.
I’d agree that the market is perhaps limited, but I know that I and several others (work from home, telecommute, tech-savvy) would appreciate being able to talk to someone with enough nouse to be able to diagnose a problem quickly to make sure that I can do my work as easily as possible. If the diagnosis is “BT fucked up,” then fair enough (and I’d then hope that I’d have an ISP that would help me harangue BT wholesale about it until the un-fucked it), but at least I wouldn’t be waiting around for someone whose job is just to read a script to diagnose intermittent catastrophic packet loss problems.
On another note: businesses (sometimes) get this kind of service from their ISP (especially where hosting is concerned) so why can’t it be offered to the average consumer (within limits, obviously)?
I agree and would love to see that happen. Maybe instead they should just charge a flat fee (say 20 quid) for a support case which gets you decent support straight away, and possibly a refund if it’s their fault. I’d pay that whereas I wouldn’t pay an extra fiver a month for the ‘clueful ISP’.
Businesses definitely do get much better service and they pay a premium for it, at least over here in NZ. There’s nothing stopping individuals paying that premium for a business connection which gives you access to the better support staff.
The flat fee thing might be the sanest way for it to work actually, especially for people who want top-level service but can’t afford to pay for the whole 12-month contract (and probably don’t need all of it anyway).
Clueful users may cost more, as they demand more. eg please can I have a static /29 with these PTR records…
Self-service is surely the answer here. The ISP builds a decent web interface to mange this (like DNS and VPS sites do currently) and the rest is handled automatically. There shouldn’t be a significant additional support cost to the ISP.
You can count the number of ISPs who would be willing to do that on the fingers on one head, I think. The costs of producing such a system and – this is the important bit – making it so that no know-all and own you and everyone who uses your service far outweighs the benefits of not having to employ as many staff. Because once you get owned a few times, off your customers fuck.
I used to live in Washington DC, but know I live out in the middle of nowhere. I literally mean that. My closest neighbours are miles away. I have to drive 20 mile just to get to town. When we moved I worried about Internet Availability. Well, there are not any major ISPs where I live. Just one small local and independent ISP called Shentel. My only grip with them is that they are slow, but that is the case with most people the live far away form population centres. I have never had any trouble from them over prioritizing traffic or anything like that. There support is awesome and gives me an idea for rational support from large ISPs. Shentel literally only has four support people, and over the years I have gotten to know all of them, and they know me. They know that if I call them it isn’t because I need to reboot my router. They know that I will have the diagnostic log form the router up, and most of the time tell them exactly what need to be reset at their end. Why can’t larger ISPs just make a note on your account what technicle level they customers are. You would only have to work up to level three support once, and after that a note could be made on your account that you know your shit. That way the next time you need help you automatically get kicked up to tier three.
My internet connection was down until Monday this week. It was down for over a week.
Despite paying our bills on time, BT decided to disconnect us, “remove broadband from the line” and a number of other things. They cancelled it immediately, but apparently they need to go through it all and then demand a £50 deposit from us to setup a new line (and new phone number). Once all that was done, our ISP, Be, were able to get things up and running again.
As I’m not the line owner, there’s not much I can do which was pretty frustrating.
Dealing with Be wasn’t too bad, but BT were fairly abysmal. Would not buy again, so to speak.
I like the suggestion that reps should rate the caller after the phone call in order to make support easier and faster next time.
Another method might be to ask a technical question and gauge the response to it. The technical question might need to be varied by weekday in order to keep the measure accurate. Depending on the response, the call could be routed to an approximate technical level.
How does that sound to you guys?
Do we have anyone from an ISP who can offer some input on some of these questions and suggestions?
I work for an ISP in the states, so let me make one thing clear from the beginning, I don’t speak for them, but I do have a thing or two I think has been missed.
I think a reason that a clueful ISP might have problems competing on cost is that ISP’s in general tend to oversell available bandwidth. I know this is true for cellphone and cable providers, and I have less experience with telecom based providers, but my guess is that its similar. How much they oversell is up to the ISP, but if you have only technical users, you will have to keep more overhead, because technical users tend to use a bit more bandwidth. And especially if you are reselling someone else’s service, you are going to lose some edge on price.
I don’t work in a customer support role at my ISP, but I do know it is a large cost for us. There are several different call centers and escalations happen to another set of call centers that are more focused (internet vs phone vs business problems for example). Maybe it would be worthwhile for an extra fee to get the business support line, or to have a group that caters to people who use their connection in more technical ways?
On the flip side it seems like a bribe to get service you might rightfully expect in the first place. That’s kind of how I feel about it.
I got a friend who had a problem with his internet connection. The ISP had him “ping 10.0.0.1″ for over 20 minutes. When he asked me about this I laugh and explained to him he was just testing the connection to his modem.
The next time he had problems and they told him to ping 10.0.0.1 he told them to fuck off and REALY help him.
It’s interesting that the shotcast was discussing technical ISPs only in relation to the support they offer when things go wrong. There are many other reasons to choose a more techy ISP – static addresses, bonded up and down-link, IPv6, fully routable and un-firewalled connection, multi-path failover, usage stats and graphs etc. etc. etc.
By way of example, I have a /27 network block at home and two /28s and a /29 in the office (like me, my ISP hates NAT with a passion). The two lines in the office are bonded 21CN (so, 1.6+meg up, more when Annexe M is available). If you’re interested, the following link shows my home line usage for yesterday (I have the flu at the moment, so I was in all day): http://imgbin.org/index.php?page=image&id=1051 – it should be reasonably self-explanatory!
Our ISP is Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) – http://www.aaisp.net.uk/
Regarding the magic word, the only reason you’ll need one is if first line support are a bunch of clueless monkeys. Some ISPs actually have clueful people answering the phone (and on IRC) and a good tech ISP will be able to debug problems even if the EU is a clueless numpty.
The problem is though that it all boils down to cost – The reason people aren’t using cluefull ISPs is not because they don’t exist, it’s simply because they’re not prepared to spend the extra money. The argument that smaller and better quality ISPs should be cheaper is a little strange – would you expect a smaller and better quality supermarket (e.g. Waitrose) to be cheaper than, say, Tesco?
Nick.
I’m with TalkTalk in the UK and have the normal 40GB cap per month on their service. This isn’t a problem for me. I get about 3.5Mb down/400Kb up which again is fine. Distance from the exchange is the problem.
The only time their support hasn’t met my needs was when there was a real hardware issue on their network that was affecting the whole area, so in fairness to the telephone support guys there was nothing they could do.
I get around the Linux rejection by just talking about the settings at the router rather than my desktop experience.
Other then that it just works and I’m in no rush to change.
As background I did PC phoen support for a BIG PC seller before so I have a huge amount of sympathy for anybody who has to do frontline tech support. The completely clueless are easy to help as they listen and do what you ask. The really technical are also easy as they get it so you don’t have to use the idiot guide version. The really painful people to support are those that believe they are technical but for the specific problem you are solving they come up short. I put myself in this category for ADSL internet connections, so I try not to presume I know more than I really do and actually let the support people do their job and get my problem fixed as soon as possible.
Albert.
I for one can vouch for UK Online (http://www.ukonline.net) when it comes to the top notch technical support. I’ve had a few problems when it came to the connection continually dropping out, I asked to get put right through to the technical staff. Told them what was going on, emailed them logs with the guy on the phone to me so he could checked the timestamps to help isolate problems. Turned out BT was being a bunch of numpties, guy said he’d phone them for me, then call me back. Within 20 minutes it was all sorted out, no more connection problems. Another big problem I had is that I had people actively trying to penetrate the security on one of my servers. Asked to be put right through to the technical staff again and they actively worked with me to determine who was behind the attacks and they took care of blocking them so that it never came to my end and contacted the authorities to report the event. All I had to do was tell them is that I was a technical user, I run linux on all the boxes and they sorted me out with someone who knew what they were talking about. Been with them for over 3 years now and see no reason why I would ever want to change.
this is the best idea I’ve ever heard
)))
I’m not sure how big this problem really is.
In my 7 or 8 years of having a broadband connection at home, the amount of phone calls I had to make because of problems with my internet connection are around five. In all those cases I was prepared getting the obvious questions, like, “are you running windows 98se or XP?”, “aha linux. Please open explorer, now open the cd and click on setup.exe.”,”you must buy a different pc, because this one is broken.” In those five cases, I was prepared for some comedy. Although I was in desperate need of Internet, I knew these helpdesks are created for the least common denominator.
Usually in two or three minutes I’m able to explain the’re not talking with a n00b, so I can get them to do what I want. Maybe it’s because I’ve been at the other side of the phone-line in my college years, but I don’t find it very difficult to persuade people over the phone to explain on what level of knowledge I am, and fix my problems.
I don’t really see the problem, and wouldn’t want to switch to a techie ISP, just for those rare cases I need to spreak with them. I think that the small scales those new techie friendly ISP would operate may double the price, and I just don’t want to pay that. (I like the “Free as in Beer” in Linux almost as much as the “Free as in Speech” mantra)
A lot of people seem to be assuming that in a tech-savvy ISP (or any ISP, really) that your Tier 3 tech support people (the more technical ones) would be fully devoted to technical support. Certainly at an ISP like Comcast or AT&T or something equally large, there will probably be some FTE devoted solely to Tier 3 Tech Support, but in the case of an ISP that catered to more technical users, it’s far more likely that the people doing Tier 3 tech support are going to have other responsibilities to keep them busy when they network isn’t suffering problems.
Of course, since these people might also be your network techs, you do need something to answer the phones to inform customers of known problems so they can actually get some work done.
I already have an ISP where not only can I call up and go straight into the details of the problem but they also speak english as well as I do. Barely any wait time (5 mins at worst) to get through to support (which is free) http://www.plus.net – I have heard be / o2 are also like this also, though I have no experience of them.
Ah I forgot to mention. I once called my ISP up about traffic shaping on a game. Answered within 2 minutes and the following exchange occured -
I quickly explained I was having an issue with packet prioritization on x new game. He responded: that I should attach a wireshark dump to the ticket which he had created – I did so and within 5 minutes I not only had a response to said ticket but the issue was already resolved – not just for me but also for every customer.
That is how it should be and why changing is not even a consideration for me – I have simply had too much BS with ISPs in the past. Though I admit it helps they’re pretty cheap with BB + Phone as well.
I have a great ISP. It’s a city owned, entirely fiber network, with symmetrical bandwidth. Extremely reliable – no down time in the year I’ve had it.
Support is good as well, but I think that’s just the nature of a small company – since they only have a few support people, they don’t have the low level staff dedicated to handling dumb questions.
It does cost a little more than Comcast, but it’s definitely worth it.
I’d pay a couple of quid a month more for a clueful support line. One of the reasons I recently left PlusNet is their woeful technical support, where you get passed around their droids for days on end.
That said I’ve just moved to O2 so will see how their support works out. I’ve heard good things though.
And Bogons refers to the range of unallocated IP addresses, reserved by IANA. Of course.
I’m actually less-interested in the customer service end of this topic — since, ultimately (and like so many other problems in business and industry) it’s a management issue which will always be handled according to an individual company’s philosophy/style. And that will always include personality and fiscal concerns unique to each organization, coupled with legal lanscapes that differ from place to place.
My personal interest lies in the overall shoddiness of service available to so many people in otherwise modern, industrialized societies. We keep hearing myths about bandwidth hogs on the one side, and amazing next-gen technologies on the other that will revolutionize services, products, and societies wworldwide. Me? I’d just like a moderately-broadband service that doesn’t drop off three or four times a day.
My 2 step programme to the ultimate ISP…
Everybody employed by the ISP must realise how important and how stressful 1st line support is. And that if you let 1st line support down, you let the entire company down.
Implement ITIL from top to bottom so that you have an actual plan to back up step 1.
Trust me, this is the only way…
I’m with O2. It fails occasionally. If it’s for long, I get out the T-Mobile Mobile Broadband USB stick (£2 a day each day you use it, nothing otherwise) and switch to that.
I love the magic word idea, I’m thinking of implementing it at work – I would be the frobnitz receiver, and you may not speak to me otherwise!
With regards to ISP’s, I am with Tiscali who i have only had the misfortune of calling once, and very nearly voted with my feet. But then I realised that they haven’t been taking my Diret Debit, hence free internets which have only gone down once in 2 years. I call that #win.
Just reading through a lot of comments that say they would pay a few quid more for clueful support. My general feeling is that I would pay a few quid more for a service that meant I didn’t NEED to call support.
I used to use an ISP called uklinux.net( see http://www.uklinux.net/) who overall were very nice chaps. In the dark days of trying to get a 56k modem hooked to the interwebs they had awesome docs on how to make a PPP connection work. Which made them super-cluefull at that time. I don’t know for sure but I suspect the cost of setting up an ADSL ISP was too great so they didn’t go there. It would be interesting to track them down and see what happened…
I remember back to the early days of ISPs where the users were all geeks and the support was better. (and the problems were also more frequent). I was with Telewest as it was then, and there was a weekly email from the engineering guys on all the network changes that they were up to.
Now If I need to call up I have to lie and say I am running windows, go through all of their stupid checks to see if the problem is in my computer before they will pass it up the line and accept that their network has a problem.