said by vz fiostech 21 :This "news" article is full of crap, normal for Karl's telco bashing style. First of I am in California and last time I checked we are union employee's, so I don't know where that comment about west coast's higher productivity is due to non-union comes from is pure BS.
There are many reasons why numbers come out the way they do. In reading some of the reviews I noticed that the techs that work in the east coast are having to place their own service drops. In our area, we don't place the service drops to customers homes, they are pre-installed before we get there or we call out a contractor to climb the poles for us while we concentrate on the inside work.
Second, I also read that they fish walls and do all this extra crap, guess what it doesn't happen over here. Want your walls fished, hire someone before we get there or do it yourself. Since the east coast guys do fish walls it obviously takes a lot longer to do a job.
The other factors that go in, every house is different, a lot of the new construction already has a smart panel built in by builder, so I can come in and be done with a triple-play in 1 hour 30 min.
The biggest factor that would be skewing those number would be that when I finish that job in 3 hours and I go help out one of my fellow co-workers I have to do it by applying those hours to the job I just did, so while I may have been done in 3 hours the paperwork will show that job being done in 5-7 hours. The copper side had help tickets to cover your time on tech assistance but on fiber you just have to absorb your time on whatever job you happen to be on. That is what messes up your so-called productivity.
For those of you that call for contractors, go ahead, because the way the system works, I get one job completion credit whether it is a repair or install and I would rather spend my time on repair than installations. I have gone out on repair issues from subcontractors, in and out in 30 minutes or less, love it, simple problems to fix. Why you ask, because some of the sub-contractors previous employment was landscaping which is how then ended up laying wire.
the installers in the western U.S. are non-union (something our commenters say isn't true), and the installers in the east are unionized and "dragging their feet" because they "don't want FiOS to succeed." Karl didn't claim that, the report did, some of you people need to learn how to read
