said by swintec :

The limited things the phone techs do now before wanting to send a truck doesnt matter if they are across the street or across the globe.

said by TWCdude :

Its not rocket science when people call in and you look at the modem stats it has perfect signals and the modem been online for 155 days straight to figure out where the problem is.

said by Realtech23 :

Wouldn't that cause price increases with service when they send trucks out constantly with gas prices and such when alot of those issues can be resolved over the phone though?

said by swintec :

As long as we can both understand each other there really is no difference to me. The limited things the phone techs do now before wanting to send a truck doesnt matter if they are across the street or across the globe.

said by Mele20 :

NHD cannot ping all the modems on your node to see if others are having the problem or if it is isolated to you. I'm not sure tier 2 can see the flap data either and other things that tier 3 sees.

said by smcallah :

While I don't like the idea of people losing their jobs because of outsourcing or even when they're redundant, I don't see why it matters where a person that answers a phone is, as long as they have the verbal ability to help you.

It's not like if they're local to you that they're going to pack up and jump in the car and come over to diagnose your problem closer. If that is needed, then obviously, then someone that does tech work in your area will be there.

A phone rep local to you or far from you is going to do the same thing.

The real problem here is probably the number of people doing phone support. If they had more, perhaps hold times and service would be better.

said by MacLeech :

Too bad the modem doesn't show a history of signal levels, just a snapshot at the time it's queried.

Too bad the modem shows NOTHING of the upstream signal QUALITY received at the CMTS, it just shows the transmit level.

Too bad there are can be 3 different possible timers on cable modems and the one you might be looking at is a timer showing elapsed time since the modem was powered, not the elapsed time since the modem resync'd.

To bad the modem really doesn't track BER (bit error rate), codeword errors is kinda close but error correction makes it misleading.

So it's not rocket science to figure out what your looking at remotely may not be an accurate description of the what the customer or the modem is seeing.

said by oldbuzzard :

I've found that phone support people who don't speak English as a first language are far less likely to prove helpful than those that do. They listen for keywords and read corseponding answers from their monitors.

said by TWCdude :

Unfortunately some dont use the tools given to them

said by Mele20 :

The NHD is in Canada. I believe English is the first language for most Canadian provinces. I have rarely been on hold with NHD. Usually someone answers before the first ring. That has not historically been the case for tier 1, much less tier 3, in Hawaii. For about a year now tier 1 answers more quickly but sometimes even now you have a 30-60 minute wait. No wait to reach tier 2.

said by americanada :

I would guess companies that are outsourcing to Canada are going pull out and move them to Third World countries where the dollar is still worth something.