Whatever the advantages of broadband it is still an administrative and technical pain in the nether regions. We provide broadband for a number of field based workers and yours truly gets to be the central point of contact and support for these lines. Now, other than pinging the router or getting the user to reboot the router there is very little I can do to pro-actively support these connections but when the connections fail, and some of them do fail with incredible regularity (some of these people live out in the sticks), then it’s often down to me co-ordinate the fix. We do have dial-up AOL as an back-up but when 8MB+ files are flying around email the users tend to prefer not to utilise a modem connection.

The trouble is that the companies I deal with that provide the broadband services pretty much all sub-contract the service from BT and can do very little themselves other than test the connections and get the client to reboot the router (sound familiar?) but it’s me that gets the front-line hammering. What happens now becomes a string of the user reporting to me, me reporting to the dealer, the dealer reporting to the provider, and hopefully the reverse process but this all adds up to a huge amount of wasted time.

For example, a user reported a fault with me at 8:30 this morning and I eventually reported a fault with the service provider at 8:50am and I received an email confirming the support call. The user has called me three times since wanting to know when the service will be available again. It’s now 12:25 and I still have no feedback from the service provider. I’ve fired off another email but that’s likely to take another hour to traverse the golden goose.

I just wish there were more facilities or tools available, or perhaps even redundant routes that could kick in when a line goes down but nope, the provision of broadband remains a gamble. A gamble that pays off 80% of the time but oh that 20%.