Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 6:03 AM
Heard a story from an acquaintance the other day; he gets his internet connection through Ziggo, a cable provider.
He ran into some trouble, so after making absolutely sure that the problem wasn't on his side, he called their help desk.
After some Q&A, the helpdesk-droid determined that his router was the culprit, and he should get rid of it and hook his computer directly to the modem, since those router-thingies can't be trusted, now way no how.
So he decides to end the call at that moment and have another look at his cableing. No dice, so he calls the help desk again.
He gets a different person on the phone, stating that they are currently performing some maintenance in his area, and that should be working again in a couple of hours.
True to his words, a few hours later, everything is peachy again and he is able to get mail and stuff.
I'm really curious though, why their help desk script is so anti-router in this day and age; connecting your computer directly to the internet is just begging for trouble.
Cheers, K.
# re: ISP's living in the stone age
5/13/2009 6:39 AM by
It's not the whole helpdesk that's against routers. It's one or two schmoes who don't know about computers and who've heard things left and right, then use that in their work. Don't worry too much, every helpdesk has a few of them.
# re: ISP's living in the stone age
5/15/2009 6:42 AM by
I'm aware of that, but you'd say there would be a couple of co-workers there to set those ignoramooses straight.
Furthermore, it's been common practice to downright refuse support to people with a router for quite a while; one of the reasons you can copy the MAC-address from one of the connected computers to your router these days is that they made it impossible to connect with something other than the machine that was hooked up first.