[ale] [rant] I dislike "we only support winblows/OS X" AT&T internet

Michael B. Trausch mike at trausch.us
Sat Mar 1 22:15:18 EST 2008


On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 21:36 -0500, Thompson Freeman wrote:
> The problem is that the modem will not stay linked up (and this is
> influenced by the OS HOW??), but drops the connection. I can access
> the 
> web setup stuff on the Westell box just fine.
> 
> Basically I got told (eventually) to get an expert on my end of the 
> line with Windows, or forget it.

Comcast is just as bad.

We can be in a state of total outage (no digital, and no analog
services) and they will state that the problem is with my computer
equipment.

What will it take to get these companies to start actually getting
competent people to start doing the job of technical support, and
support only the things that they sell?  Comcast does not sell me
Windows.  They sell me a network pipe.  (A rather restricted one at
that, too.)  But at the very least, they should realize that the network
is operating system independent, and that "ping" is ping, "traceroute"
is traceroute, and "route" is route.  They should realize that things
like NAT and DHCP and IP addressing are operating system independent.

Now, I can see being nice enough to provide information on how to dig
this information out of Windows systems, or Macintosh systems, or
whatever.  What I don't get is why they won't simply accept the same
bloody information based on the fact that (expected_os != actual_os)
when operating system has absofrigginglutely nothing to do with it.

Thompson, I definitely feel your pain.  I have been there before,
myself.  Every single time I contact technical support for my Internet
connection, the servers at my school, a broken Web site, a broken
Internet service, or speak to anyone else that collects a paycheck
working with something called "technical support" which is, honestly,
anything but technical.

I have a friend that lives in Ohio, and he works for Buckeye
Cablesystem.  They provide 10 Mbps services for NW Ohio and SE Michigan.
They also seem to be somewhat reasonable there.  He is an Ubuntu user,
and the cable operator is competing with everyone else in the area on
the basis of having solid technical support.  The nice thing is that
they are actually permitted to provide _technical_ support.

Once upon a time, there was a really bad routing issue on Comcast's
network.  This was sometime last year.  Do you know what they blamed it
on?

My operating system.

By the time I finally got to speak to someone that was technically
competent (from the business account support services, which is where I
wound up for some reason) he basically told me that if I wanted to have
accessible support of a technical nature, that I would have to have a
business account.  Amazingly enough, he was kind enough to take my
problem report and verify that the trouble was there on the phone and
forwarded the issue to the NOC---or so he said---but the people for
personal/individual support apparently don't have "has a sound knowledge
of networking concepts or anything about how the cable company provides
service" on their list of requirements.  There are people that are on
the floor that have that knowledge, but it's really hard to get to them,
and you really have to know someone on the inside to get anywhere.

It's a clusterfsck, and I don't understand why this persists to be a
problem.  Windows is _not_ the only thing out there, and these companies
*know* this, because they often use UNIX and UNIX-like systems on their
own networks, even.  But they seem to refuse to believe that users of
their services would ever /dream/ to run anything but Windows, and so
they fail to support anything else.  WTF?

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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