ISP customer service
After manually resetting everything and not getting internet access, I called the company that supplies internet to our home. It was astonishingly easy. There were only a couple automated inputs before I spoke to a Real Person. Some businesses make it nearly impossible to get to a real person to speak to, and if by some miracle you get through the thicket of automated options, make you wait for an hour to speak to them. They even set a time to Call You Back, when a customer service representative is available. Compared to that, this service call was a breeze.
And then it turned… odd. I waited while the customer service guy’s debugger tried to contact my router; it worked, apparently. That is, it connected. But I couldn’t access the internet. He said there had been an outage in our area, but that it had been corrected. He suddenly asked about our internet usage. I told him we use it a lot. We have three people constantly online. He then suggested an upgrade, for no extra cost, to speed up our internet. We would need a new router costing five dollars. Otherwise our 80 dollar monthly bill would not go up.
He described the upgrade as increasing our internet speed from 50 to 500… whatever the measurement of internet speed is. I didn’t catch the term he used. But I gather it’s significant. My internal BS meter went off; no business willingly increases the value they’re giving to the customer without some increase in income. Mentally I checked with the Spirit; what vibe am I getting? Is this okay to do?
The salesman, no longer just customer service, talked it up, said the monthly bill will stay the same; the only cost would be five dollars for shipping the router. I felt nervous about this, but we do use the internet a lot and we need it to be reliable and fast. Liz regularly streams video while voice chatting and running a processor heavy game. This makes even her newer laptop stutter. Add Joshua’s doing the same, but streaming the game he’s playing while voice chatting, and my playing Minecraft Java Edition while voice chatting. We have even played computer games and used our phones, while streaming a movie or holding a family voice and video chat on the TV! Besides our family’s heavy educational and entertainment usage, I stream music videos to help me sleep, as a lullaby. It’s a lot. We have three different phones looking up information and using wifi to text our family members. The phones are set to use wifi whenever possible, to avoid phone data connection charges and/or throttling (reducing the stream to free up cell service for other users).
I agreed. He promised the moon, and made it sound easy to install once the router arrives by mail in a few days. I question the easiness of the process, but am willing to believe that, if necessary, a phone call to a customer service person just like him will clear it up. It was almost a relief to get a phone call from the company the next day about this transaction. I thought the woman was going to cancel it or tell me it would cost more. But no, she said it will require a technician coming to install the new router in our home, and wanted to schedule that. We set a day a couple weeks in the future. In the meantime we have internet access at home. It seems to be working fine.
I described these interactions to my teenage son. He was the troubleshooter yesterday before I even got up in the morning. He agreed that it was odd that there was an outage, corrected, but that we didn’t get internet back until after I called them. And he was surprised that they said we’d get a more powerful router for no increase in cost. But, he said, “What if they upgraded their equipment and didn’t tell us, and didn’t realize until after the fact that our router is too old?” In that case, the customer service guy would want to upgrade us as soon as possible, in the meantime restoring support for our old hardware, so that we wouldn’t leave the company or worse, complain online.
