ATT GigE issue on 11/19 in Kansas City

Wed Nov 30 19:35:57 UTC 2011

On 30 November 2011 17:45, Joe Maimon <jmaimon at ttec.com> wrote:
>
>
> Brad Fleming wrote:
>
>>>
>> In either case I'm a customer and will likely never be told what went
>> wrong. I'm OK with that so long as it doesn't happen again!
>>
>>
>
>
> Does being told what happened somehow prevent it from happening it again?
>
> What is the utilitarian value in an RFO?
>

"The outage was caused by an engineer turning off the wrong router, it
has been turned back on and service restored"
"The outage appears to have been caused by a bug in the routers
firmware, we are working with the vendor on a fix"
"There was an outage, now service is back up again"

A brief isolated incident in any case you probably don't care enough
to change providers (if you care about outages that much, you just
divert traffic to your other redundant connections), but say you've
had 2 outages in a week with that given as the explanation, which one
makes you feel more concerned about going shopping for another
provider?

Technically the first provider knows the causes of the outages and it
has been fixed while the second one doesn't know for sure what the
problem is and they might have fixed it or might not, however I
suspect most people would probably not agree with that interpretation.
The third provider I don't think there's any way to interpret it to
make them look good.

>From a utilitarian point of view the more detail customers get the
less angry they normally are, and I believe "less angry" is a
generally accepted form of "happier" in the ISP world (at least some
ISPs seem to think so). Therefore for utilitarian reasons you should
write nice long details reports, unless the cause is incompetence then
you should probably just shut up and let people assume incompetence
instead of confirming it, as confirming it might make them less happy.
Although one could also argue that by being honest about incompetence
your customers will likely change providers sooner, causing an overall
increase in their level of happiness. This utilitarian thing is
complicated.

- Mike