I started 2019 by buying a new home. When I say new, I mean brand spanking new as in “just built.” As I’m preparing to move in, I did what most folks would do first these days and called my local Cable TV/ISP to come set up the house. The builder did a good job of preparing the house for both cable TV and for wired internet and phone. There is a large junction box in a closet with both coax and Cat 6 wire running to most rooms. The living room and master bedroom both have conduit running into the crawl space for wires to be run easily. Frankly, I thought the hardest part of getting everything set up would be joining the coax and network wires that were hanging out of the side of the house to the main feeder lines. I was so wrong, and the reason why I was is quite instructional for any of us in business.
Hooking the house to the main lines was easy. Then, the tech set up the cable modem and router for my high speed (400MB+) wifi network. So far, so good, The problem came when I asked about connecting the wires that were in the closet to a switch or the router. None of them have caps – the little plugs – on them. “I don’t do that,” he said. But how can I connect the rooms to the network? What about putting the coax wires into a splitter for cable in the various rooms? At least that would help me identify which wires ran to which rooms. No help there either, even though he is the cable installer.
The final bit of laziness came when he informed me that he couldn’t run any cable through the conduits. He said he couldn’t find the conduit opening in the crawl space even though he pushed a long rod down the conduit and then went to look for it in the crawl space. I went down the next morning and found the openings in about 2 minutes. Yes, it was late (4p) on a Friday afternoon and I’m sure he wanted to get out of there, but still.
So here are some things we can all take away. First, the fact that the tech had no idea how to run wired internet tells me that the cable TV companies still think they’re in the cable TV business. Any look at the numbers will show you that people care far more about broadband and their ability to stream than they do traditional cable TV. If you are an Internet Service Provider, that you need to provide the damn service, and that includes wiring houses. I want my smart TV’s wired in, along with my game console. It’s a much better experience than via wifi, even high-speed wifi.
Second, the techs are customer service people along with being technicians. This guy was very nice but did nothing to solve my problem. To make matters worse he never left any paperwork so I have no way to know what exactly he did do. I can’t even tell you what my VOIP phone number is. Any company representative that deals with customers in any way should be trained to do so properly. They must have a focus on solving problems, not on creating them. And they certainly should never lie.
My ISP doesn’t know what business it’s in. They still think they are proving cable TV. They also still don’t understand how the power in all businesses has shifted to the customer. Let’s all agree to start 2019 by rethinking what businesses we’re really in and how we provide it to our customers, shall we?
Consult Keith 