[geeks] How old am I and where do I come from...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Gary Nichols wrote:

> Ironically enough, $employer is looking to make broadwing our primary
> service provider real soon.

BTDT.  The ISP I used to work for used Broadwing as their primary upstream
and colo back since they bought that facility (previous owned by IXC).
They are a far better carrier than anyone else I've dealt with, and they
have suits that -listen- to customers, which is something that lets me
easily forgive the four prolonged outages (shortest was 1 hour, longest
was two months[1]) we had with them in three years.

Any and all problems we had with them were solved within a day by calling
my calling our account rep, and, like I said, that encourages me to
forgive pretty-much -anything-.  Even so, having dealt with the
data-networks divisions of SW Bell, UUnet, WorldCom, GTE/Verizon, AT&T,
Cox Communications, Grande Communications, and Pontio, I can say Broadwing
is light years ahead of them in terms of keeping things working and
keeping me happy, even if $moronBeanCounter forgot to pay them that month.

The case that really sticks out in my mind:
  Me:  Do you offer $service?
  Rep: No.
  Me:  If you can give me $service ASAP, I am willing to pay $steepPrice.
  Rep: I'll get back to you.

  ... later that day ...

  *ring* *ring*
  VP:  Hi, is Jonathan there?
  Me:  That's me.
  VP:  Hi, this is $person, VP of data services and infrastructure at
       Broadwing.  Would you like to beta-test $service?
  Me:  Uh, sure.
  VP:  We weren't planning on rolling it out for a couple of months, but
       it's ready for beta now, so we'll let you try it for free, if you
       promise give us feedback.  Then, once it goes live, we'll charge
       you $muchCheaperPrice.
  Me:  Joy!

To top it all off, later that year when we had a problem with a guy at the
NOC (who was fired shortly thereafter) who refused to take downtime
seriously, $VP gave me his cell and home numbers in case anything went
awry again.


[1] Not on a production network--they gave one of our DS1s to someone else
    and couldn't find it.  So, not -all- our stuff was down for two
    months; it just took two months longer than normal to get an expansion
    DS1 up and running.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "gnu: we aim to fuck up everything with the potential to not suck"
                                                   --alex j avriette