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Filthy lucre

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:06

Steve Cassidy sticks up for the moneymakers - sort of - and has a run-in with a few Broadband router products.

It's exactly the same with internet connections. Listing all the variety of ways that a pipe to the rest of the world is useful to a company is a daunting task, especially if you're going to do it competitively with an accountant on one side and the head of sales or R&D on the other. Almost certainly because of how we nerds think our estimates are going to be way off, but the exercise is still immensely worth doing so that you know what you're working with inside the company... and outside it too, because my most stressful episode this month arose from diagnosing a misbehaving ADSL connection.

The sheer diversity of false trails and dead-ends were simply astounding. It might have been a DoS attack, might have been brought on by a slippery, largely hidden trojan, it could have been a hardware fault in the router itself (although, in accordance with my suggestions in the box Lotus and routers opposite, this was a reassuringly simple device), or it could just have been the connection. My request that someone in the company make sure it wasn't the ADSL line itself that was down just received a stonewall response from the ISP's helpline staff, who in turn demanded conclusive proof that it certainly, for 100% sure, wasn't any of those other options. Since this was a remote office, that involved a small matter of someone toddling down the motorway - at least once per question/test pair - because according to said helpline staff, they only worked with organisations that had technical staff at every site with a connection to it so they could ring back when it suited them.

Eventually exasperation started to grip the team that was trying to find a fix, and being the sort of people they are, the divergence between what they were saying and the way they were saying it increased to a point where it became impossible for the ISP's script-driven helpers to ignore the obvious any longer, namely that this (to them) cheap connection was in fact generating far more stress than they'd so far realised. This lead to one of those useful - but so often delayed - conversations where they actually owned up that the order in which they requested things to be rebooted, replaced and reconfigured actually wasn't the order most likely to achieve the fastest fix but rather the cheapest order for them. This was because they couldn't take the risk that BT Openreach's engineers, having been called out to diagnose a fault, would charge a callout fee if they decided there was no fault. This fee could be as much, the tech-support line confided, as £230!

Simply add up the aggregate hourly pay rates of all parties involved - just for the company's tech team and the ISP's helpdesk - and that cost is utterly trivial. Pile on top of that rough guesses at the hourly pay of the company's users (money men and lawyers remember), the managers who had to work around the dead connection, add on a stab in the dark at the company's lost earnings, and it brings you to a figure compared to which £230 barely covers the cost of the time spent listening to the ISP's hold music. The fact that this ISP was entirely obsessed with fixed-price contracts and sought to avoid all extras, well past the point at which the cost to the clients became unsupportable, just goes to show that the moneymaking logic of some people is completely out of touch with the real hazards that crop up in any business relationship. Avoiding that Openreach callout charge for a couple of days is about to cost this particular ISP the renewal of an annual, multisite connectivity contract worth some £50,000 plus.