What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

Thu Aug 18 17:45:07 UTC 2011

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:21:57AM -0700, Mark Keymer wrote:
> I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At
> least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
> 
> I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite
> frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the
> people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are
> not very technical.
> 
> Just the other week I could see fairly clearly that I was getting routed
> through there network and then started to have issues in a town about 3
> hours away. I tried to explain this to the rep but they thought we
> needed to reboot my modem. Surprise that didn't work. I mostly called
> just to put in a FYI having issues here, please have the smart people
> look into it. It is my understanding that they need to get X amount of
> calls before things get escalated. Granted I am sure they monitor there
> network too. But I called about 10 mins after the routing issues started
> to happen and there was no notifications that there was any issues. Even
> after being on the phone with them for 20? mins. Still they showed all
> is good and that it must just be me.
> 
> I know we have a wide range of people here some of which work for my
> Home ISP. and would love some feedback.

I call. Frequently I'm the first to call in a problem. Turns out that I
sufficiently impressed one of the helldesk twinkies (not a total bozo; he
ran his own home net of FreeBSD and NetBSD boxes) that he put a note on the
front page of my record saying something like "This guy Knows His Sh*t;
listen to him and believe what he says." This one even knew about flushing
the ARP cache after renumbering.

If you can get past the rote scripting and "we only support Windows", you
may well have a chance.

I'm a cablemodem subscriber to a large ISP/phone/TV provider in .ok.us;
that may nail it down sufficiently for most folks. Their helldesk scores
above average in my book.

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin 