Web Worker Lessons from a Cable Service Problem

By Nancy Nally Dec. 31, 2009, 9:00am PT 11 Comments

Web workers are dependent on, well, our web. So what do you do when yours is broken and you can’t convince the cable company of that? What do you do when everyone’s is broken and no one can convince the cable company of it, for days? Sound like some kind of nightmare doomsday conspiracy theory? Well, it actually happened in Central Florida over the Christmas holiday. Before it was over, I learned a few valuable lessons as a consumer and a web worker.

Brighthouse is the major cable and high-speed Internet provider for most of Central Florida. In the area where I live, they are actually the only high-speed provider. Web workers, of course, usually need the fastest and best quality connection we can get.

About a week before Christmas, I started noticing trouble connecting to several sites. I blamed the DNS errors on vacation traffic clogging the sites. But by Christmas Eve the issue had spread to almost all the sites I used, making my Internet connection virtually unusable. Extensive troubleshooting determined the problem was outside the house on the cable connection.

I decided to wait until after the holiday weekend to complain. But over the weekend I began seeing reports on Twitter from people I knew in the area experiencing the same problem. They did call — and the customer service people wouldn’t believe or admit that the company had a service problem.

Customer service reps told complaining customers that the problem was their personal router was broken. The offered solution was to plug directly into the cable modem to bypass the router. This was despite the fact that many of the callers were computer professionals who assured the reps that they had done extensive troubleshooting before calling to complain and they knew that the trouble was outside their homes (and some even knew roughly where it was through tracing packet loss). They got nowhere.

This situation highlighted something that can cause frustration for web workers. We are in the top echelon of computer users. We push things to their technical limits. We know ten times more than the typical user that the technical support script is written to help. We frequently know more than the “support” person on the other end of the phone. But convincing them of that can be difficult. How do we manage that?

In this case, the solution to being told there was no service problem was to prove that everyone had a problem. So the affected customers organized ourselves using social media. We started sharing info via Twitter so that we could tell customer service that it wasn’t just an isolated problem because we knew other of their customers that had the same problem. Using this information, some people were able to get customer service to acknowledge there might be an issue.

The biggest help, however, was when the media started reporting the problem. A local TV station and the Orlando Sentinel both picked up the story. Within only a couple hours, the problem that supposedly didn’t even exist was magically solved, after having dragged on for at least a week.

The lesson I came away with was that fighting as a group is more powerful than going it alone — and even better is having a reporter or two in that group.

After my Internet was back to normal, I realized that besides learning a valuable lesson about how to fight back as a consumer against a recalcitrant utility, the experience had also exposed a major flaw in my business emergency plan.

My “Internet outage” emergency plan has always called for going to family members’ homes, the library, Starbucks or McDonald’s to work. With Brighthouse being the only high-speed Internet provider in this area, all of those locations are likely customers of Brighthouse also and thus in a situation like this would have been as useless as my home service. I am going to have to do some research into alternative options in case of another emergency that renders the cable company’s service inoperable area-wide.

As a web worker, my Internet provider has me over a barrel. I am dependent on them and since they are effectively a monopoly, I have very little leverage with them. This weekend, I got a taste of how that can affect more than just my bill.

Does it worry you to be so dependent on your Internet provider?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.