What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support

Bill Stewart nonobvious at gmail.com
Mon Jan 5 07:28:11 UTC 2009


Assuming that what you're getting from Verizon is copper and not FIOS,
there should be a number of small to medium-sized ISPs that will provide you
with Layer 3 Internet Service using that copper.
It will cost you a few dollars a month more, but not a lot more,
and you'll not only have more chance of getting somebody with a clue
to answer questions,
but you'll be able to do things like running servers from home if you want.
It looks like Sonic.net doesn't cover Long Beach, but Speakeasy does,
and you should be able to find a range of other small clueful ISPs.

The off-shore call-center business has changed a lot in the last decade;
in addition to Bangalore undercutting the Nebraska and Utah call centers,
there are cheaper places like the Phillipines undercutting Bangalore,
and Canada's been trying to address unemployment in former fishing villages
by promoting call centers (which has the advantage of good English),
and VOIP has simplified work-at-home distributed call centers in the rural US.
But still, if your company is outsourcing first-line support to script-readers,
then they need to be good at recognizing when to get past the initial script
and escalate to somebody with more training.

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Jay Hennigan <jay at west.net> wrote:

> The person wasn't capable of getting the hint when
> I asked after several minutes of frustration what the "A" in "AT&T" stood
> for, and in fact claimed to have no idea.

Actually, for the last N years, the "A" in "AT&T" is just a letter;
the company name stopped being an acronym for
"American Telephone & Telegraph" even before they were bought by
the Company Formerly Known As SBC.

-- 
----
             Thanks;     Bill

Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far.
And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.




More information about the NANOG mailing list