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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Dunno how it is in the States, but here in UK rolling out the tech is basically the first thing they do after the unavoidable "have you tried turning it on and off again" phone call. They just don't trust the customer to have any clue and maybe don't want to waste time doing troubleshooting at their end when it's "probably" a downstream issue.

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Network Operations should be raising known problem issues to front line call centre staff.

Network congestion issues shouldn't be handed off to field techs to check local loop (last mile) and CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.

I'm pretty sure it's standard practice at these companies to never let front line call center staff acknowledge known problems. Sometimes, the automated phone menu will give you a recorded generic message that they are currently experiencing a service issue, but that's intended to convince you to hang up and patiently wait for them to sort their shit out. I've never had a front-line rep be at all useful in diagnosing a real problem.

Yeah true.

I guess I need to remember the ISP I work for here in Australia (front line tech support, and then network operations physical security and infrastructure) was widely recognised as the best ISP in Australia multiple years running, so I shouldn't use it as a baseline expectation.

So how was life at internode or aussie?

Internode.

Yeah, was a good place to work. I was in their Adelaide data centres when iiNet acquired the company.

In NZ you sign up with an ISP, but your local connection is usually handled by the same physical equipment (DSLAM for ADSL, etc) which is owned by a single network provider.

I’m not sure what the incentives are for an ISP to try to get the provider to fix issues, or even if they would e.g. https://company.chorus.co.nz/what-we-do is notoriously bad for service and the copper network is being deprecated. Locally https://www.enable.net.nz/about-enable/ are doing a good job of service, because they are well subsidised by the government and seem to be effectively operated.

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