I usually recommond to every customer that they purchase a wireless/wired router for thier internal home network, and 90% of my tech support is suggesting to customers to reboot thier routers when thier service goes offline.
not only as the president of the company, but from a tech support side im concerned that only a few customers can logically determine the difference between the router failing and my network sucking. is this a problem that is mainly on my network or does everyone see this as well? with 700+ customers i spend way to much time support the routers that the customers purhcased.
how are others dealing with this issue?
btw any linksys wireless router that is a v5 are just horrible. i have found the much cheaper airlink routers not only out perform the linksys router but also are much more reliable.
vince
vince@vcweb.org
http://valleycenterwireless.com
760.749.0828 ext 3
We don’t provide any support for routers, period.
You’ve backed yourself into a very bleak and unhappy corner, there… 
I agree that the routers suck.
We have started using the NAT functions in the SM’s and they seem to be more stable. Now the only thing inside the network is the customers PC and possibly a Hub.
If they need port forwarding or ports opened up, then they get a router, but I hear than 8.0 will support port management - looking forward to that! No more crappy routers.
The customer’s perception is key. If they think the network sucks, then anything I say is an excuse unless I can prove they have dirty power, or the PC is infected…etc. Getting rid of the routers is key.
Jerry Richardson wrote: The customer's perception is key. If they think the network sucks, then anything I say is an excuse unless I can prove they have dirty power, or the PC is infected.....etc. Getting rid of the routers is key.
We just tell them that the supported configuration is one computer, directly plugged into the SM. Any other configuration, we will look at the SM for signal strength, determine that there is an Ethernet connection, and tell them to meet our supported configuration or fix their problem themselves.
This gets the hackles up on their necks sometimes, but really, do YOU want to be the one to offer free support for a customer's WiFi network over a phone call?
Shaman666 wrote: .....but really, do YOU want to be the one to offer free support for a customer's WiFi network over a phone call?
Not really. but we do it. It's one of the reasons that our customers remail loyal. That phone call is also an opportunity to provide add-on, on-site services.
[/quote:1enagqho]
Jerry Richardson wrote: [quote="Shaman666":1enagqho]
Not really. but we do it. It's one of the reasons that our customers remail loyal. That phone call is also an opportunity to provide add-on, on-site services.
Well, I can tell you don't have (more than several) thousands of clients. I do. We'd have no rest at all if we did what you're proposing to do.
True. I suppose at some point we will have to stop.
Looking forward to having several thousand customers though! NextWeb sold to Covad for $35 million with 3000 business customers. I could live with that.
we as an ISP supply our clients with a router for free, including 24Hr backup with a 30minute response time to any technical fault.
These routers remain our property and are replaced in the event of failure, free of charge.
This is quite an expensive and tedious exercise, but its all part of our “quality of service” promise to the client. Broadband internet here in africa is still very expensive, so we have to come up with ways of convincing the client that it is beneficial to be with us over dial up.
Shaman666 wrote: [quote="Jerry Richardson":2otcc3fe][quote="Shaman666":2otcc3fe]
Not really. but we do it. It's one of the reasons that our customers remail loyal. That phone call is also an opportunity to provide add-on, on-site services.
Well, I can tell you don't have (more than several) thousands of clients. I do. We'd have no rest at all if we did what you're proposing to do.[/quote:2otcc3fe][/quote:2otcc3fe]
Shaman - What kind of customer base do you have sales techniques? We are a company that has been in existance now for about 2 years and struggle in some areas with sales. What are your key points of interest that you use to sell? Anyone?
We have some dedicated sales people, but not all those clients are wireless. We have a mix of dial-up, fibre, DSL and wireless (soon also cable).
We have put about 600 people on in the last year for wireless, however. And hopefully, we can do better than that in 2006.
What a subject of controversy, but always comes up.
Jerry, do you want responsibility of your customers PCs getting hacked because of their lack of knowledge?
We found a very reliable and inexepensive router that we can enable remote management. This serves multiple purposes. We can always ping the router to determine reliability of connection. If we can get into the router’s remote management interface, and since we provide the router at our expense, problems that are not ours are immediately identified if we can get into the remote management interface. Very powerful to tell user when he booted his PC by looking at the LAN port interface state. The minimal cost of the router easily pays for itself in elimination of unnecessary over the phone trouble shooting of non-ISP problems.
Do you have the time to debug the user’s PC problems? If you are charging for it, you even have a more powerful arguement to charge them for it. Also, can you afford to have their viruses afflict your network with a directly connected PC?
Enough…
We do not connect the customer directly, we always have them behind NAT. Previously we were using Linksys routers with remote management turned on, now we use the SM NAT.
Using the NAT functions in the SM acheive the same thing as the external CPE routers without the CPE router. If I can log into the SM, and there is a link active, then that pretty much tells me what I need to know.
Once we are able to determine the problem is at the customer end we offer on site service at 125/hr. If they don’t want to pay it that’s OK, and if they do it makes it worth the time.
There are many times where we’ll install a new customer, and they do not have a router and we turn NAT on.
2 weeks later, they call and complain that they’re down and they better not be having these troubles in the future… Later to find out that they’ve added a router and they have NAT on.
Sometimes double NAT will work, however most of the time it won’t. People who use VPN and don’t have a router also may be effected by NAT.
So now we’re frequently printing off new documents with disclaimers of lack of service due because the PEBKAC.