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JTC
Always Mount A Scratch Monkey
join:2002-01-09
USA
 ·Comcast Workplace
 ·Integra Telecom
| reply to maximus_808
Re: Why did our beloved DTVDSL go under...........
As someone who worked there in the order manglement department, I can offer a few theories:
1. (Mis)Management sucked in the corporate offices. They were known for their weekly company breakfast meeting at one of the local shops and sending people to various meetings in other states vs using the big freaking pipe they had for video meetings.
2. Poor treatment of staff. Virtually everyone in the Beaverton site were temps (and poorly paid ones at that). While the head of DTV DSL came down and was overheard bragging about his new Lexus, the bulk of the people were making less than $12 an hour for temp agencies that didn't care about us (one of which told someone to their face that if they didn't like the way they were being treated, there were plenty of other people who would love to have their job). The suits constantly dangled the carrot of being an employee in front of everyone then made comments such as 'it is not about being employed, but being employable'.
3. Bad design decisions. The DTV DSL modems were in no way proprietary. One of the problems they had was that if someone ordered the service, they could plug in a standard DSL modem and have it work, provided it handled the protocols correctly (PPPoE in Ameriwreck areas anyone?). The only reason policy was to use only the DTV supplied modem was for it to 'phone home' to get it's IP and to let the billing systems know to start charging. This is why after a set amount of time any account that did not show up as active was pushed to a billable state.
4. Left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. We were handed down so many policy changes it was sad. We would get some new directive from above that made no sense and was going to make things even more time consuming and difficult almost daily, then 30 minutes later it would be changed yet again.
5. Morons running the show. Often, we would have to do the job of some other department in te main office becasue they either did not do their jobs or didn't know how. I can't count the number of times we had to teach some of the people in the main office how to use a freaking web browser or use a spreadsheet correctly, not to mention many of them wanted something to be done with the billing/customer tracking system when they had never used it themselves. Also, in the Beaverton site, politics and favourtism was all over the place, while the suits ever knew was was really going on, they just looked at numbers (there was one supervisor who was known to hire based on looks over ability).
6. Poor choices in software/hardware. We had an abortion of a CRM program to use that ran on a fscked up mix of M$ java, VB and HTML. It was so bad that it had to be run under IE5 as IE6 would break it... and yes, it had to be run via a web browser... On Pentium 3 machines with Win2K pro and only 128 megs of RAM.
7. Priorities all messed up. While their staff was all still temp (which is a proven failure of a business model as it will cost a company more to keep the bulk of their employees temp vs hiring them both in money and productivity), they were busy having new modems designed to be able to handle voice over IP. They were jumping into contracts with carriers and getting really crappy deals with them to increase coverage vs making sure what they did have was the best it could be. Things were looking up when Worldcom got onboard with the 1.5/768 static lines vs ameritech's 768/128 PPoE.
Go back in the archives and read some of the posts that came out the day they shut the doors for a larger picture of just how badly the place was mismanaged (the railroading of tech Bob comes to mind). There were many reasons why DTV DSL went under, these are just a few.
JTC
(Yes, the above are my opinions and observations from working there. I reserve the right to be wrong and totally on a mind altering substance as I type, not that I am, but I reserve the right)
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DSLTech
join:2000-12-30
San Jose, CA
| I dont know if you comprehend the meaning of proprietary. The modems certainly were such.
Thats not to say that you couldnt figure out how to use another modem as some did, but the gateways themselves were made in-house.
The fact is that each customer was adding a certain MINUS $ ammount to the accounts. Until they could reach a particular customer base, or period of service per one customer, there would be absolutely no profit.
Many companies in this field based their pay and budget on 1999 and 2000 rates. There were many people that were overpaid for the times we're currently in. Profit margins for an ISP are quite low, if anything at all. The additional cost of the gateway design and manufacturing broke the camel's back. | |
JTC
Always Mount A Scratch Monkey
join:2002-01-09
USA
·Comcast Workplace
·Integra Telecom
| said by DSLTech  :
I dont know if you comprehend the meaning of proprietary. The modems certainly were such.
Yes I do know the meaning of proprietary. OK, to be exact, the modem design was proprietary, but that was it. The DSL signal coming from the telco was still the same one used by the 'generic' DSL modems.
This was one of the first things told to us when we were being trained on how the DTV DSL systems worked. One of the smaller issues they had with the setup was that some people would plug in their old DSL modem they got from the telco and, wow, it works fine. But since the DTV modem never got plugged in, it never contacted the OSS server, which is how the accounts automagically moved to the billable stage.
We had a contact at the corporate office who would pass along any information he got from the 'all hands meetings' they had, so we often would find out things that corporate didn't want us to know. Believe me, the cost of the modem design was a very small part.
As for the thin margins at an ISP, I know this fact very well, as I was part of a small local startup ISP that went under. I didn't work the accounting side, but when the entire staff consists of five people total, there are no secrets. 
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