Re: Cheap home CPE troubles

[todd glassey <tglassey () earthlink net>]

On 12/27/2010 11:53 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Dec 27, 2010, at 7:10 AM, Mike wrote:
>
> > 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!
>