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Author Simes
Created:  1999-06-15
Last changed:  1999-06-15
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What do they expect ?

After my marathon post about the BLFH, this is a smaller post about something related to the BLFH. However, it appears that all lusers suffer from the following....

Just what do they expect for their subscription fee of £10 (or in some cases £12) a month ? Whilst we as an ISP do have a duty to provide a good service that is reliable, customers seem to expect:

* Low cost, ie free. With free local phone calls as well[1].
* 24 hour, 7 day a week, 52 week a year technical support line that you can always through to on the first try.... and it has to be able to solve any problem you want there and then:

Customer: <Ring-Ri>
ISP: "GrumbleSmurf Internet, how can I help you ?"
Customer: "Make my web access go faster"
ISP: "Certainly sir, I'll just have a T3 connection installed to your house >pause< There you go sir"
Customer: "Great, its almost fast enough now"
 
Customer: <Rin->
ISP: "GrumbleSmurf Internet, how can I help you ?"
Customer: "Bring peace to the world"
ISP: "Certainly sir...."

* A line (and modem) for them to connect to whenever they want.
* Bandwidth at the ISP so that they can get the maximum speed from their modem, no matter where they go on the Internet (ye, even Taiwan during the time the entire country had naught but a 64Kbit/sec link connecting it to the outside world).
* As much free web space as they can upload into.
* A list of sites with XXX "point and drool" pictures for them to download, and don't forget the warez either.
* 100% uptime... no outages, even if paddy with a spade goes through all of the ISP's links to the outside world
* EMail that is always delivered, even if the user got the EMail address hopelessly wrong.

[1] Local phone calls in the UK aren't free except in for some of the areas cable companies have been. Southampton is one of these areas with free local calls being provided by Videotron. Some of our lusers have managed to stay online for about 90 hours a week before.

sigh you may have guessed, its being one of those weeks again.

Posted on 13th Dec 1995
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Author Simes
Created:  1999-06-15
Last changed:  1999-06-15
 
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