John Linton ......bloody Exetel.
I have seen the statement many times since February 2004....and it came to mind earlier this morning when MY internet slowed to "dial up speeds". But having been around a while I instantly remembered that I had, because I'm terminally lazy, been deferring renewing my AV licence because that would involve getting up, going to another part of the house and retrieving my credit card. So I renewed my licence, painfully slowly because of the capabilities of the newer viri that try and prevent you loading AV software, and eventually after much swearing and disk cleaning and removed the viri that had accumulated on my disk while I was breaking every rule I have painfully learned since I first used internet seriously.
So it made my usual late Sunday start two hours later than it usually is - but at least I didn't ring up some help desk and abuse the unfortunate person who answered my call for being employed by a "hopeless" company which "steals from its customers by using two cans and a piece of sting for a network". I don't know how stupid such people are to actually think that any network that runs well for a long time would suddenly "run worse than dial up" - these same people are always affronted when the CSR asks them if they done an up to date virus scan recently. They tend to 'scream' "of course they have" and slam down the phone - never to be heard from again. Presumably they had yet to understand that large networks don't suddenly lose 95% of their function and the most probable explanation lies within their own control.
I haven't looked into detailed analyses of support calls for some years now - leaving that level of detail to the people who operate customer support - but when I did the number of 'customer equipment problems' versus actual carrier line problems was over 9 to 1. As the 'average' user gains more experience (and AV software is more widely deployed - and used correctly!) I would have assumed that the 9 to 1 ratio would have dropped quite considerably over the past few years...but, as I said, I haven't checked. I need to do that now as we progress in planning for FY2012. The number of support engineers required to cover 16 hours a day, 7 days a week is not inconsiderable even for a network that remains as uncontended and stable as Exetel's (particularly when you strive to have an average response of under one minute). While the average experience/knowledge of ADSL customers in general has significantly increased the same number of "bloody Exetel" seems to exist. There is also the post 'NBN2' announcement scenario where carriers seem to be more tardy in upgrading exchange back hauls than they were in the past and that is becoming a growing issue. It will be interesting to see what percentage of support calls are now caused by exchange back haul contention.
In general terms we have settled the major parameters for next year's endeavours which are based on even more conservative thinking than in any of the past years. This is unexciting and, in many ways just plain boring, but the many uncertainties in the market places we address and the many uncertainties in how and what other suppliers to those market places may do makes this a very difficult time to be 'aggressive' or even 'brave' (thank you for the reminder Sir Humphrey). However, as anyone who has been in business knows, being boring is something that you plan to do at your peril - particularly in a company of Exetel's size. Therefore we need to deal with the issue of ensuring that 'life' for each of our individual employees is 'exciting' while planning on an overall set of plans that are very far from exciting.
That is itself is challenging enough to remove some of the boredom.
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