Cheap home CPE troubles

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Hi,

  Well as is customary in our part of the country (Northern California), with the stormy weather comes brownouts and blackouts comes a massive influx of end users with locked up and malfunctioning home networking equipment. Every single time the power sneezes, massive waves of customers just 'go down' and then I get to pick the pieces all up by talking to each individual and instructing them how to pull the power and then plug it back in, or worse, their cpe needs to have it's settings restored since the internal flash memories got cleared or corrupted.

  We see this in the cheap home gear all the time. Makes me mad since linksys/netgear/motorola got away with the customers money and incurs ZERO support costs or any apparent liability for their product, where we in turn get to deal with upset subscribers who have been 'down for days...' while all the time the solution - powercycling - was within reach.

  Is there anyone who has a script or process or policy concerning unreliable customer equipments and how to effectively deal with unsophisticated home users? I mean, users with business oriented gear (eg: cisco 26xx, 8xx, pix, and the like), and doubly especially those with working standby UPS, we never ever hear from and they have extreme uptimes, but home users aren't willing to hear $500 - $800 in gear is required to 'make it work all the time'. They interpret that to mean that there's just something wrong with us since WE 'require' such expensive and exotic equipment in order to work right, and they would be better off somewhere else.

  Any comments?

Mike-

2

Send each customer out to buy this:
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BE350G
problem solved.

Andrew

3

Hi,

  Well as is customary in our part of the country (Northern California), with the stormy weather comes brownouts and blackouts comes a massive influx of end users with locked up and malfunctioning home networking equipment. Every single time the power sneezes, massive waves of customers just 'go down' and then I get to pick the pieces all up by talking to each individual and instructing them how to pull the power and then plug it back in, or worse, their cpe needs to have it's settings restored since the internal flash memories got cleared or corrupted.

Yep...

  We see this in the cheap home gear all the time. Makes me mad since linksys/netgear/motorola got away with the customers money and incurs ZERO support costs or any apparent liability for their product, where we in turn get to deal with upset subscribers who have been 'down for days...' while all the time the solution - powercycling - was within reach.

I think your only option potentially effective option would be to engage the great american tradition of legal reparations. (IOW, sue them for causing you harm by unleashing a product with a known defect and foreseeable harmful consequences).

  Is there anyone who has a script or process or policy concerning unreliable customer equipments and how to effectively deal with unsophisticated home users? I mean, users with business oriented gear (eg: cisco 26xx, 8xx, pix, and the like), and doubly especially those with working standby UPS, we never ever hear from and they have extreme uptimes, but home users aren't willing to hear $500 - $800 in gear is required to 'make it work all the time'. They interpret that to mean that there's just something wrong with us since WE 'require' such expensive and exotic equipment in order to work right, and they would be better off somewhere else.

Amusingly, I could turn this around in my situation... My gear comes from the providers in both cases. In one case, I purchased the cheap DSL modem from
the provider (which, admittedly, has been rock solid through many power outages). In the other case, I'm renting the CMTS box from Comcast which doesn't
even require a power failure to lose its mind periodically. (Apparently there is a known problem where every time Comcast does a firmware update to the
boxes, N% of them loose their minds). Arguably, at $5/month, over the life of my service I will likely pay quite a bit more for the CMTS box than I did for the DSL modem ($40). In fact, being a little more than a year since I got Comcast Business Class, I have already done so.

Indeed, the running joke is "I need fast reliable internet service, so, I get fast service from Comcast and Reliable service from Raw Bandwidth."
Unfortunately, as amusing as the quip may be, it's also an absolutely true statement about my network.

Owen

4

If power glitches are the problem, doing a bulk buy of UPS units and
offering them cheap/at your cost to your customers as a bonus of them
doing business with you, may solve the problem.

--Patrick

5

Yes - you need to have a basic troubleshooting guide for the victims of the manufacturers bad documentation. The most important thing is to tell the client how to reboot whatever device is providing their DHCP leases so that they can restore their service.

The other thing which is of value we find is to close that sheet out with a request that the customers contact the manufacturer directly to tell them what they think of their product and you give them the proper email/web links to make that happen.

Trust me if at Netgear Patrick Lo gets 500 emails from upset customers they will change that process immediately.

Todd

6

Hi,

  Well as is customary in our part of the country (Northern California), with the stormy weather comes brownouts and blackouts comes a massive influx of end users with locked up and malfunctioning home networking equipment. Every single time the power sneezes, massive waves of customers just 'go down' and then I get to pick the pieces all up by talking to each individual and instructing them how to pull the power and then plug it back in, or worse, their cpe needs to have it's settings restored since the internal flash memories got cleared or corrupted.

Yep...

  We see this in the cheap home gear all the time. Makes me mad since linksys/netgear/motorola got away with the customers money and incurs ZERO support costs or any apparent liability for their product, where we in turn get to deal with upset subscribers who have been 'down for days...' while all the time the solution - powercycling - was within reach.

I think your only option potentially effective option would be to engage the great american tradition of legal reparations. (IOW, sue them for causing you harm by unleashing a product with a known defect and foreseeable harmful consequences).

  Is there anyone who has a script or process or policy concerning unreliable customer equipments and how to effectively deal with unsophisticated home users? I mean, users with business oriented gear (eg: cisco 26xx, 8xx, pix, and the like), and doubly especially those with working standby UPS, we never ever hear from and they have extreme uptimes, but home users aren't willing to hear $500 - $800 in gear is required to 'make it work all the time'. They interpret that to mean that there's just something wrong with us since WE 'require' such expensive and exotic equipment in order to work right, and they would be better off somewhere else.

Amusingly, I could turn this around in my situation... My gear comes from the providers in both cases. In one case, I purchased the cheap DSL modem from
the provider (which, admittedly, has been rock solid through many power outages). In the other case, I'm renting the CMTS box from Comcast which doesn't
even require a power failure to lose its mind periodically. (Apparently there is a known problem where every time Comcast does a firmware update to the
boxes, N% of them loose their minds). Arguably, at $5/month, over the life of my service I will likely pay quite a bit more for the CMTS box than I did for the DSL modem ($40). In fact, being a little more than a year since I got Comcast Business Class, I have already done so.

Indeed, the running joke is "I need fast reliable internet service, so, I get fast service from Comcast and Reliable service from Raw Bandwidth."
Unfortunately, as amusing as the quip may be, it's also an absolutely true statement about my network.

Owen

yep!

7

Happened a few years back to one ISP I know.

The common ADSL Modem given away free with the accounts (Dynalink DSL302G is the one I'm using right now, might be a few other models) had a problem that if authenticated failed (due to the account being locked say) and logins failed continuously for several minutes in a row the box would lock up and could only be fixed via a power cycle (NOT a restart from the the menu options).

So the ISP had a few little problems and the authenticated servers were unhappy for a few hours and 10-20% of the not-trivial customer base ended up in this mode. Took the helpdesk about a week to get everybody working again - They had to talk people though resetting the right piece of equipment (not rebooting their computer etc) and obviously some had changed their passwords or settings to try and make it work so those had to be fixed.

Dynalink put out a firmware fix for that bug and the ISP pushed it to customers after that and made sure the newer equipment didn't have it.