What’s obvious from notes from Christopher Ogg and Dan James is that I could have probably skipped the queue, phoned Kevin at home, and got at my email last night, therein avoid the customer service assault.
Perhaps next time Island Tel loses its DNS, or has routing problems, I will call Stephen Wetmore and test Christopher’s hypothesis (which I have a feeling is completely correct).
It seems that Kevin’s intrinsic understanding of how customer service works broke down last night largely because of outsourcing issues. This goes to a point that I raise time and time again, which is don’t outsource your customer service. Customer service is what an ISP is about. Technical issues don’t matter. Bandwidth doesn’t matter. Customer service is an ISP’s product, not bandwidth.
Kudos to Kevin O’Brien for has candid explanation of ISN’s service outage last night. Also interesting to note that Dan James’ experience was almost exactly like my own, except I didn’t call Kevin at home.
Note to Internet Service Providers: stop it with the username obsession. It may be Absolutely Important for you to keep track of us in your Big Database, but it means Absolutely Nothing to we users, and is Very Annoying.
ISN service was restored at about 12:15 a.m. The following appeared in ISN’s System Bulletins section (annoyingly only available to ISN-connected IP addresses, and even then you need a username and password):
Computers Do ThingThat’s a pretty good service bulletin, and certainly more honesty and wit than Island Tel has ever mustered.
Friday, May 25 2001
Never believe that computers don’t think, because they chose the one day I was out in Georgetown visiting family to blow up. Our connection to the Internet went down sometime this evening (around 8:15pm) and came back up an hour later. This was caused by our border router (the machine that all our traffic goes through before it reaches the rest of the Internet) crashing, probably due to a dead air conditioner. The router (and the air conditioner) have been fixed, and we are not expecting any more problems. We appologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our users.
Charles Tassell
System Administrator
Let it never be said that only Island Tel can offer bad technical
support. Tonight after Larry King
and before bed, I decided to check my email. Although my bandwidth to the office here comes
from Island Tel, my mail is on a server across town,
connected to the Internet by ISN.
So I opened Outlook, and waited for the mail to flow forth. But it didn’t.
A quick ping and traceroute suggested that the problem was at ISN’s end of things — traffic
was making it as far as AT&T, one or two hops upstream from ISN. My usual backup for problems
like this is to dial directly in to the Charlottetown POP. But that wasn’t working either; the authentication
server was picking up and accepting my username and password. And then croaking.
So, like a good customer, I dialed 892-4476, ISN’s “one number
for all things,” and heard Kevin O’Brien’s recorded voice telling me to immediately press 1 for
technical support. So far so good. Pressed 1. A couple of rings, and another voice announcing that I’ve called
ISN’s support centre. Listen to another round of prompts. The voice tells me to press 1
for dial-up support and 2 for web hosting support. Figuring that my problem is more networking than dial-up,
I press 2. And the voice comes back and tells me to hang up and dial a toll-free number,
877-476-6381, option 3. So I hang up and dial that number. And what do you know… it’s Kevin O’Brien’s
voice again, same recording, just like 892-4476. Same instructions to press 1 for technical support; but I know where
that leads, so I stay on the line. Eventually I’m told that if I have “urgent questions of a
non technical nature” I should press 3. Well. What should I do?
So I hang up and dial 892-4476 again, press 1 again, listen to the rings again, and press 1
once I get the opportunity. Next I’m treated to 3 minutes of what sounds awfully like
Yanni (does anyone in the technical support business have any
taste in music at all?). And then a helpful sounding chap comes on the line and asks me for my username.
Fortunately, unlike Island Tel, where one’s username is
actually a kryptonic code of numbers and letters, my username at ISN is simply peter, so
I give it over.
Friendly phone guy tells me that they are aware of the problem, and that there was a problem earlier
in the evening which they thought was fixed around 10:00 p.m., but it seems to have come back. They’re
working on it. That’s about it. No offer to phone me back once the problem is solved. No explanation
about what the nature of the problem might be. The nice phone guy seems pretty much as in the dark as
I am.
How should this have worked? I notice a problem. I call 892-4476. I hear a message: “Hello, this is ISN.
It’s now Friday evening at 11:32 p.m. We are aware of the technical problems with our Internet service,
and have traced the problem to blah blah blah. Our technician Bobby is en route from his house in blah blah blah
and should be on site by 11:49 p.m. We expect to have service restored by 12:10 a.m., 43 minutes from now. To receive an
automated telephone call at the number you called from when service is restored, press 1. To find out more about this technical
problem, and immediate steps you can take to get access to the Internet right now, press 2. We apologize for
your frustration, and assure you that we’re doing everything we can to solve this problem. Complete details
of the reasons for this service outage will be posted to our website within 2 hours of restoration of
service. Have a nice day.”
Assuming I press 2 at this point, I will be transferred to a real live person (being on hold for a
bit is fine, as long as the hold music is, say, Los Lobos). When I get to talk to the real live person,
they will have a Sympatico or Auracom account ready for me to use until service is restored (just like
Air Canada used to let Canadian Airlines passengers fly on their planes when something broke).
Moral? Attitude is everything. Technical problems happen — it’s how you handle them,
and kung fu them to your advantage that’s the
key. Tonight I’m going to bed email-less and frustrated.
Disclaimer: I’m good friends with Kevin O’Brien, the voice
on the telephone telling me to press 1. He bought me lunch at the Noodle House
last week. I designed ISN’s ad in The Buzz
this month. I think ISN is a good company. But some times even the good
can have a bad day.
One small success today on the Island Tel front: I received an email letting me know that my High Speed Internet account and my Residential Telephone account will now arrive on one bill. While this isn’t quite the nirvana of one bill, it does remove the problem on not being able to pay my Internet bill using Internet banking. Apparently part of the problem, beyond legacy system integration, is that, to quote the email, “ITAS bills in advance, Island Tel in arrears.”
Christopher Ogg writes (in the guest book):
As you appear to have passed into sunlit uplands with IslandTel, could you please ask them (over tea and scones, no doubt) if they could check their routing tables to see why it takes so many hops to get from their network to ISN’s?This very fact has always been a Big Practical Problem for me, as Reinvented’s own gear is on the ISN network, and bandwidth to my office is on the Island Tel network. I checked last night, and my traffic from my office desktop to my office server was travelling 19 hops, through Toronto, Montreal and New York, to get 3 blocks up Richmond Street.
This situation is, of course, insane, and in the good old days of the Internet somebody would have seen this insanity and suggested that ISN and Island Tel install a mini-MAE East (in other words, connecting their networks locally, rather than through their far-upstream providers), therein giving ISN customers better access to Island Tel-connected resources, and vice versa. They could even set things up to measure the traffic in each direction and, just like transport trucks do, settle up at the end of each month to make things all equitable.
But, alas, this hasn’t happened (although I’ve suggested it, and, I think, ISN has suggested it) and I’m prone to thinking that, because of Island Tel’s control and dominance issues, it never will.
When we first put the Prince Edward Island Visitors Guide online back in 1995, I needed a an icon a dog to display alongside listings where pets were allowed. So I did my best, and came up with the proto-dog you see blown up here. It was never a very good rendition of a dog. But it has done its job for 5 years without complaining.
Recently the dog has started turning up, uncredited, on other websites. Because it’s such a wonkly dog, it’s easy to tell when others have stolen it. Look here for example. Or here.
I can’t say that I’m particularly peeved by this kind of theft (although it is formally prohibited), but it would be nice if people would ask first.
Today was an interesting day of developments in reaction to my Open Letter to Island Tel.
First came a call from the ever-helpful Island Tel salesguy, Kevin Lewis. Kevin made it clear that people inside The Company were reading the letter, and that there was a “team working on a response”. A team! Who would have ever thought.
Oddly, given everything else that I said, Kevin’s primary reason for calling was to get some information on the chronology and specifics of the Island Tel Advanced Solutions DNS outage that I made passing reference to in the letter.
The second call came from Chris Keevill, who is the new head of something called Aliant Broadband, which appears to be something so new the Aliant website makes no mention of it (for those just joining us, Aliant is the Atlantic arm of the Bell Canada empire, formed by the marriage of the regional telephone companies).
Much to my surprise, Mr. Keevill had actually read the Open Letter, and was able to quote passages from it (this is a Good Sign). While short on specifics, he did seem to be of an attitude more conducive to bringing about some changes at The Company (or rather The Company). He seemed more like a “regular guy” than most telco management types, and seemed to understand and speak more in common sense language than in telco-speak.
When I told him that my Big Problem was that every time I brought some technical issue or another up with Island Tel I was made to feel like an idiot, he did offer (I’m not sure if this was a formal corporate offer or not) that I wasn’t an idiot. That would seem to be a Good Sign as well.
Apparently Mr. Keevill has his team working on many of the problems I brought up, and he plans to circulate The Letter to team members.
So there are two teams working on, well, something. And I may not officially be an idiot in the eyes of Island Tel. Stay tuned for Chapter Two.
I called Island Tel’s technical support on Friday evening (that would be 5 days ago for those of you who are counting) about a problem with their DNS server. I got a voicemail this afternoon from a friendly Sympatico technical guy telling me that the problem had been fixed. Did I mention that the problem started 5 days ago?
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
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