[33790] in North American Network Operators' Group
CAIS DSL failure: lessons in how not to inform
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Howard C. Berkowitz)
Wed Jan 24 11:15:41 2001
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Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 11:08:28 -0500
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@clark.net>
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I'm in a SOHO environment with SDSL from CAIS. After several
intermittent failures in the last few days, I've now been down for
about 24 hours. There's no question that I'd like to find out (1)
what is wrong and (2) when it will be fixed, but I'd like to review
some of the problems as a guideline for other providers.
The only available status information is the phone trouble number,
which, up to a few minutes ago, said "we are having some issues with
one of our DC core routers. It affects all CAIS DSL customers." I'm
sitting on hold now; even that message has gone away.
suggestion 1: when a failure affecting dedicated user access exceeds
more than (4?) hours, send email to subscribers and/or post
something on an internal web.
suggestion 2: make this at least somewhat meaningful. In a DSL
environment, at least some indication if the problem is in or between
the local loop provider, DSL aggregator, local ISP, or upstreams.
Some estimate of restoral time. In this case, I find it hard to
believe that a core router in a major urban area can be down this
long. Is it an upstream problem? Facilities? Lack of backup? DSL
provisioning?
suggestion 3: accept that business-grade customers are busy. If I
do have to sit on telephone hold, I'll often put the phone on speaker
so I can do other work. Please do not insult my intelligence with
periodic blathering about "your call is important to us," "it will be
just a moment," etc. Based on your results, neither are true.
suggestion 4: For that matter, can the music on hold. If I'm doing
other work, I don't need the distraction. When I hear a noise from
the phone, I want it to be meaningful.
suggestion 5: if you must put a voice response on your trouble line,
give the time of the response, and update it frequently. 24 hour
outages deserve a bit more than "our technicians are working on it."
With major router vendors, this would be a priority 1 failure with
executive visibility. I'd like to know that my service provider
treats it as seriously.