Cheap home CPE troubles

Mon Dec 27 15:10:15 UTC 2010

Hi,

	Well as is customary in our part of the country (Northern California), 
with the stormy weather comes brownouts and blackouts comes a massive 
influx of end users with locked up and malfunctioning home networking 
equipment. Every single time the power sneezes, massive waves of 
customers just 'go down' and then I get to pick the pieces all up by 
talking to each individual and instructing them how to pull the power 
and then plug it back in, or worse, their cpe needs to have it's 
settings restored since the internal flash memories got cleared or 
corrupted.

	We see this in the cheap home gear all the time. Makes me mad since 
linksys/netgear/motorola got away with the customers money and incurs 
ZERO support costs or any apparent liability for their product, where we 
in turn get to deal with upset subscribers who have been 'down for 
days...' while all the time the solution - powercycling - was within reach.

	Is there anyone who has a script or process or policy concerning 
unreliable customer equipments and how to effectively deal with 
unsophisticated home users? I mean, users with business oriented gear 
(eg: cisco 26xx, 8xx, pix, and the like), and doubly especially those 
with working standby UPS, we never ever hear from and they have extreme 
uptimes, but home users aren't willing to hear $500 - $800 in gear is 
required to 'make it work all the time'. They interpret that to mean 
that there's just something wrong with us since WE 'require' such 
expensive and exotic equipment in order to work right, and they would be 
better off somewhere else.

	Any comments?

Mike-