techrecovery | Sep. 15th, 2007

Just have to get this off my chest. I work as first tier (yes I know) tech-support for a large global company (and provide support for other large global companies... we're their outsourced helpdesks). One of our users just called in having troubles getting onto the VPN. They had just talked to us about half an hour prior and one of our techs told them to contact AT&T (their provider). AT&T claims the problem is not on their end, since the modem is sending and receiving fine but neither home computer nor work computer are able to see the internet, they're giving the nice little "limited or no connectivity". Now, I can see them foisting the guy back on us for his work computer, but for the home computer to not be able to get on the internet when we don't touch them? That's a deal breaker in my book. Luckily, it appears that the problem was resolved by powercycling both modem and router (and dear lord do I hate those individual boxes that combine the 2 and wish I knew of a way to turn off their wireless capabilities if the user has a separate router).

I guess my question is, is it normal to have someone get off the phone with their provider with no internet? To add backstory to this, apparently he'd been on the phone with AT&T for several hours today over a couple of periods to get his internet fixed. Now, there was also some minor issues with one of our techs trying to set up his wireless (fixed in 2 minutes remotely and on-site couldn't do it in 2 days) way prior to this. Upshoot was, I got both computers working, wireless set up and secured and him on the VPN, in only 30 minutes.

Still grumbling about that AT&T tech though.