On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Owen DeLong wrote:
I'm curious how people feel about this. As I see it, there are a number of
possible responses:
I think you omitted at least one other option.
Contact your own ISP, i.e. the provider you pay, and report the problem.
You make the choice how much support you want to pay for when you select
your provider, including what type of inter-provider contacts they
maintain. Your own provider can confirm who you are, knows your history
about reporting problems, perform preliminary diagnostics and
sectionalization to confirm a problem exists, maintain contacts to the
next provider in the chain, etc. Other ISPs are more likely to recognize
the reputation of an ISP they maintain a relationship than random
callers.
If you want high touch support, your provider will probably charge you a
high price. Other people may be prefer a low price and are satisfied with
that service, as apparent by the other customer not opening a trouble
ticket with their ISP. The Internet does not have uniform service levels,
nor uniform pricing for any level of service.
This method seems to work better in other industries with customer
contacts, e.g. you call your credit card company about problems not
the merchant's credit card company, you call your shipping company
about problems not the transit carriers a package may have traversed,
you call your telephone company about problems dialing another telephone
number not other phone companies, and so forth.
