What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

From: "Jon Lewis" <jlewis@lewis.org>

It can be frustrating talking to their frontline people, but unless you

have contacts there in network engineering, what else are you going to

do?

I just want to put in a tip o' the hat here to the BHN/RoadRunner

*business*

support people who handle Tampa Bay. I have had to call them, oh, 20 or

30

times in the last 5-7 years, mostly on behalf of clients, and their front

line is *sharp*. They understand CIDR, they don't freak out about DNS,

and

they understand MTR -- hell, some of them *use* MTR.

And they don't get scared when you know what you're talking about.

Agreed. The same can be said for the Business support here in Central Fl
Bright House region. They are generally pretty decent. If you tell them you
bypassed the modem and tested. Or it's a problem off your network (routing
issue upstream) they don't waste your time with making you do it again.

I think the big difference here is the Residential BHN service first sends
the call to the national "Road Runner" help desk. And when you get a level
2 and above, Your talking to a local person. You skip right to local if the
sees your modem is dead.

Where is the business support is always a local person.

/2cents

This is why I love my mom and pop DSL provider, I can call and get someone who speaks packets and listens and understands. I may not have the speed some cable providers offer (if you actually get it..) but it is reliable and I can get resolution quickly. Short of that, tether the laptop to my phone can get my by in a pinch.

Jason

It's one of the things I appreciate about the ISP I use at work being local. Their first line are rarely that technical, do a great job of quickly and painlessly filtering out users with basic problems, and quickly escalate. If needs be I have a direct phone number for the CEO and founder of the company, someone who is CCIE qualified.