The 'Cable Guy' Now a Network Specialist 235
Hugh Pickens writes "Amy Chozick reports that cable guys, long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science and certifications in network engineering. 'Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,' says Paul Holloway, a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. 'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.' The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies in an increasingly saturated Internet-based market where growth must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. 'They should really change the name to Time Warner Internet,' says Quirino Madia, a supervisor for Time Warner Cable. 'Nine out of 10 times, that's all people care about.' Despite their enhanced stature and additional responsibilities, technicians haven't benefited much financially. The median hourly income in 2010 for telecommunications equipment installers and repairers was $55,600 annually, up only 0.4 percent from 2008."
Hmm.... not so sure about this .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know that the cable providers are really trying to get "Network Specialists" to do the installs? I completely agree that times are changing, and today's installer is much more likely to be bringing the connection into a home for Internet service than for simply watching TV. But the median pay doesn't sound that out of line to me, for what I think they're really looking for -- which is someone capable of efficiently driving to customer locations and following some defined procedures to hook up the cable and attach the required equipment.
The real "Network Specialists" they'd pay a lot more for would be the guys working at the "back end" of the cable company, managing the large switches handling all the traffic going out to various neighborhoods and ensuring people aren't hacking a modem in some way to get more bandwidth than they paid for. Other back end workers would be responsible for such things as rolling out firmware upgrades to the cable modems or set-top boxes on their network, testing equipment that comes back in as defective or customer returns, and keeping on top of network outages.
Just because today's customer is more sophisticated and wants to attach 15 or 20 devices to their connection doesn't mean the INSTALLER is expected to assist with any of that. My personal experience with cable company troubleshooting of issues (such as intermittent connections) tells me that if anything, they'll ask you to disconnect the cable modem from everything else and troubleshoot with only one PC connected directly to it. They don't really understand, or WANT to understand all the other things you might be trying to do with it.
Re:Not comcast (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't generalize this. I've seen some bad Comcast installers, but some of they are quite with it. In fact, if you're dealing with the business division, those guys are quite good. One of the last guys I dealt with asked me why I had a business connection at home. We started talking and he was a big Linux fan. He thought it was rather cool I ran a BSD project out of my house. Even shared some insight on their IPV6 deployment plans with me.
Re:Not comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
...I had to show them how to use ping.
On the other end of the spectrum, needing to call technical support simply to get the ips of the name servers I needed to use elicited a salvo of "Can you ping the servers?" and "Can you give me the output of tracert?" Finally, after 15 minutes of explaining that I was using linux ("That platform isn't supported"), I could configure my machine myself, and all I needed was this one bit of information, the "tech" on the other end of the line actually seemed annoyed with having to give up the one piece of info I actually needed.
Re:Theory based Degree can get killed in the cable (Score:4, Interesting)
Last decade I worked for a cableco and we had the opportunity of free training from this place called Jones/NCTI basically a paper binder self paced training system, fax in your chapter test answers, then study the next chapter, repeat. I took a couple classes for the heck of it (although it had nothing to do with my job, we had what amounted to a free site license, where any employee could sign up and it was rubber stamp approved). The frontline techs were required to take these classes, engineering staff not required. The classes were pretty good and basically explain in great detail very clearly (modern high school level, old middle school level) more or less how not to end up in a link from Joe_Dragon on /.
Simple individual case incompetence, is probably much more likely than company wide lack of training.
Re:Not comcast (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
What I do:
Them: Hello my name is $OBVIOUSLY_FAKE_NAME
Me: $OBVIOUSLY_FAKE_NAME, is it? I know you have a script and all, but please save us both some time and just escalate me to a higher support tier, the info I need isn't on your script. (If they refuse, then I say: "Sorry about this, I know calls are recorded... so, I'm right pissed off and I'd like to talk to your manager!")
Once I've got the next higher up support personnel on the phone I can usually say things like: "I need the IP list for my name servers, my IP is: xx.xx.xx.xx", or "Your cable-tech guy forgot to give me the admin password for the modem, what's the standard PW or reset procedure & web-based config?" and I'm off the phone in mere moments.
IMHO, there's no need to ever mention what OS you're using. If they ask I tell them it's none of their business, they sell network service, not software.
Re:Hmm.... not so sure about this .... (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw one of them once. He was a pretty awesome tech, and knew what the hell he was talking about. Basically the first tech just came out, looked at our install, and verified that it was okay. He metered it and everything to make sure that it worked. After about a week, our cable modem started dropping 1/4 to 1/2 the packets(tested with ping). We called, and Comcast sent that technician back out, who proceeded to say that everything looked fine and it was probably our cable modem. Needless to say, the new modem they gave us also started dropping packets like mad.
We called Comcast again, and they sent out a line technician, who got into our attic and started doing signal quality testing with the cable line in our house, after he verified that the other tech did everything right. He determined that the line inside our house was good, but that the line between our house and the curb was RG-59 and that it needed to be restrung with RG-6 to avoid the signal loss problem we were having. He did that, and fixed the problem.
So yes, OP's statement is accurate, and their line techs don't appear until they've exhausted the toolkit of the level 1 tech, because their typical customer base tends to fuck things up after the installer has left.
Re:Not comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish there was a menu option you could select in the phone tree system that says "I hereby declare myself to be competent in the topic at hand. I have tried the routine troubleshooting to no avail, and believe the problem lies beyond my control to fix. I agree to pay a $50 surcharge if you prove me wrong and I should have stuck with the regular support staff.