BCP Question: Handling trouble reports from non-customers

Sat Sep 2 01:38:40 UTC 2006

On 1-Sep-2006, at 18:48, Steve Gibbard wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> I think my previous post may have touched on a more global issue.
>>
>> Given the number of such posts I have seen over time, and, my  
>> experiences trying to report problems to other ISPs in the past,  
>> it seems to me that a high percentage of ISPs, especially the  
>> larger ones, simply don't allow for the possibility of a non- 
>> customer needing to report a problem with the ability to reach one  
>> of their customers.
>
> Anybody trying to put together such a BCP should first give some  
> consideration to what sorts of calls from non-customers a service  
> provider should be expected to accept.  Based solely on Owen's  
> earlier post, this looks to me like a good example of why service  
> providers are sometimes reluctant to accept trouble reports from  
> non-customers.

A long time ago, I was a backbone engineer at 6461. There was one  
particular 6461 customer who ran online games, and whose customers  
were encouraged to submit noc tickets to 6461 every time they had an  
issue with network performance.

This resulted in a lot of tickets. Gamers being their naturally  
twitchy selves, though, there were lots of times when we got really  
early notice of problems that monitoring hadn't picked up and which  
weren't reported by anybody else until much later (if at all).

So, there is *some* benefit in accepting tickets from non-customers  
and churning them through the support process, even if it's not  
especially cheap to do.

Joe