It's been years since I've had the job title of Network Analyst. I worked for a major south-eastern ISP in their NOC (Network Operations Center) for well over a year. Since this company fired me for being later more times than I have living brain cells, I think I can write about my job there with little remorse.
It was a dream of mine to work for this ISP. The company I'm referring to is Bellsouth.net. I don't know what prompted me to want to work for them, but something drew me to that company and luckily for me I happened to know someone in the NOC. It was the husband of a co-worker at my dad's company who got me interviewed and ultimately a job at the company. I don't think I knew they were getting paid for bringing a new hire but I think I figured it out later. I wasn't bent about this though because it was a mutually exclusive thing.
My job role in the company was basically a receptionist according to the documentation. I was a level 1 tech who's main function is to simply answer the phone and put in a trouble ticket if one is needed. It was my job to make sure a problem was found and to work through something that wasn't a problem. It was the responsibility of a level 2 or 3 to do the real work of the situation to find the problem.
I didn't really like being the receptionist and the worst part of the job was answering phones. I prefer to be the wizard of Oz when I work on something computer related. Don't contact me, I'll contact you when it's done. If I need you, I'll put on my wizard outfit and come out every once in a while but I preferred to be the silent person behind the scenes. Attention never really appealed to me here, even though I loved solving challenging problems and had my share of some really good ones.
Purpose of Posting
In this post and a couple that will follow, I'm going to attempt to remember what life was like back then and give you a very small look at a very big ISP. Most likely not much has changed in the industry and what I tell you about this company, you can probably apply to every one out there. I say that with no joke because even though we were an ISP ourselves, we had to deal with them (UUNet or as I called them: PooPooNet) which was a lesson in how not to behave, yet I found our company doing many of the same exact things.
Customer Treatment
Money determines the level of service. This is usually expected, but dial-up users or those who paid $20 a month were treated like dog crap. You only got real service from the NOC if you were a T1 customer, who paid usually around $1000 or so a month. The ratio is about correct though because while the T1 customers had pretty excellent service, the dial-up users were often left stranded. The famous quote used was “Fuck em, they're dial-up” to which I've heard numerous times.
I'm from a time and a place where service is determined my the “family effect”. Would you give your mom crappy service even if she paid $20? Most likely no. Unless you're shrewd and a complete tool, you'll most likely want to show your mom the same respect you show to the $1000/month customers. So why should others be treated differently? I don't think they should but then again I wasn't paying the bills.
Disconnected Corporation
While Bellsouth.net the ISP was part of Bellsouth Corp., we had power struggles with the Telecom side of Bellsouth. You would think every company under a corporation would act the same because of the name Bellsouth, but we didn't. Customers would only see Bellsouth on the shirt, yet the majority of the time they dealt with about 4-5 different companies. What's sad is each company seemed to have its own agenda which would often hurt one or more of the other companies. DCSC dealt with many of the T1 service calls. They were the group we sent out on site to hook up the T1 and test the physical line. We had more problems with them than a red-headed step child but apparently that didn't seem to be a big issue.
It was often said that to the customer we were all Bellsouth, but that never really went over well with the other companies. .Net (what we called ourselves) was alone in a sea of Telecommunications companies bundled under the Bellsouth logo. We were drowning then but I would think things have changed now.
Conclusion
I don't think much has changed since I left. I keep in touch with co-workers who have moved on to bigger and better (.Net was screwing all of us) but the majority of the industry is still like this. Telecom companies think that because their service is something people can't seem to live without, that they can charge whatever prices they want. The costs of routers, lines, and equipment has dropped drastically over the years yet many companies are keeping their pricing schemes in tact. I don't see the justification in it but then again I'm not the ones convincing people that the same service costs the same amount of money (or higher) while the costs of doing said service have dropped 60-80%. The math doesn't add up but no one seems to care because every company is doing the same thing. Maybe it's time for more competition to bring a reputable face to the Telecom industry but I won't hold my breath.