Rant – Dovid's Blog

March 1, 2009Dovid Bender No Comments

The fault game

<rant>
I sort of had it with the service providers. It seems that everyone here loves playing the blame game. If you call the cable company its the ISP’s issue. If you call the ISP then its the cable companies issue. A little while back a customer called up the phone company and stated that their internet was not working. The phone company said that it was an issue with their ISP. After speaking to the customer about which lights were lit up on the modem it turned out that the mode was not plugged in. How dumb is the telco ? They are so fast to blame the ISP where the modem was unplugged.

Which service provider do you hate the most ?

</rant>

July 4, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Rant: We are people not crab

I can’t understand how ISP’s are getting away with offering us the same features as they did yesterday and charge us more. My current ISP worked great for VOIP and recently started getting real bad. I called them up and explained my issue’s and they told me I would need the “gamers package” which was optimized for gamers who need a fast steady connection. A month ago it was working fine and now I must pay for “good internet”. I don’t get it. Treating your customers like S*** and expecting them to more to keep up the same level over service does not work out there. What did I do ? I simply switched ISP’s. So far things are working well. It’s a matter of time before my new ISP starts creating issues and I will be forced to move on or pay a premium price for the same lever of service I was receiving a short while earlier. Oh well it seems they are treating us like crab. They boil us down slowly so we don’t see it coming until it’s too late.

July 4, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Some customers are just not worth it

There is a golden rule in life that I go by “You get what you pay for”. I have potential clients that come to me and want to know why my rates are cheaper than the “other guy”. They want my quality service and the next guys rates. It just does not work. Some one came to us recently. He complained about our rates. When we asked him why he was moving over to us he responded “well my current carrier is down some times for hours”. PEOPLE YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR !!!! If you want quality service you are going to pay for it. Teliax for instance charges 2 cents a minute to the US. Some consider this a bit high, however they have great customer service. If there is an issue generally they are great at solving it.

I had a client who wanted to host his Asterisk server from his home off his cable line to save money. I explained him that it was not worth it and that a server in a data center would be worth his while. He went with hosting it in his home. Two months later I get a call at 1:00 AM from him begging me to switch him over to a server in a Data center. He was on a conference call and the quality was horrible. He lost a deal worth all over $30,000. Was it worth it for him to go cheap on the $200.00 a month hosting ?

Remember – Y.G.W.Y.P.F (You Get What You Pay For).

July 4, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Rant: Tech Support is NOT your personal slave !!!!

I HATE IT when a customer that spends with you $20.00 a month expects you to everything for them. I recently had a client call me and complain about a very serious issue that was affecting a lot of his clients. He demanded that I get it fixed right away. Now I work on giving the best customer service possible but I am limited. If I were to do that for every client I would get no where. Also I will add that what the customer wanted was more of a feature than a severe bug. Just because a system does no preform to the exact liking of a customer does not mean that it is a bug. I recently had a friend relate to me how he had a client whom he set up Asterisk for and put the box up (a very good one I may add) in a data center. The client called him and stated that system was down and demanded that he fix it at once. He explained that he was on vacation and will look at it when he had time. There was no support contract between the two of them and the system was working fine for many months. The customer assumed that if he paid $200.00 for co-location then he was entitled to all the support in the world. In the end the issue was that the customer did not pay his ITSP and his account closed off. This brings me to another issue when your system is down it does NOT mean that mine is. I have another client that calls me from time to time saying “your lines are down”. As always I run a check and most of the time it is his internet that is having issues. I grab a trace, email it to him and show him that it is an issue at his end. Why do people always blame the next one. Check it out on your end and see if there is an issue. I have more to rant about but this will do for now.

May 15, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Rant: “Asterisk/VOIP Professionals”

This has been brewing in me for a while. You have people running around claiming to be VOIP and Asterisk experts when all they know how to do is work a GUI. If I know how to use Windows XP does that make me an expert ? I have nothing against people using GUI’s how ever since they just use a GUI they never learn what goes on behind it, which I will admit some times you don’t need but in the case of Asterisk you need to know the “guts” of Asterisk to trouble shoot issues. Take TrixBox for example. It is a great tool that generates lines and lines of code. If there is an issue they don’t know how to figure it out by looking at the code (since they are experts…. in the GUI only and don’t know how to write any code for Asterisk). They then get charged by the creators of TrixBox roughly $200.00 an hour to solve the issue. It also gives a bad name or us “other” VOIP installers. They put in a system that they are unable to maintain. They instantly turn off customers to the goodness that is VOIP.

April 7, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

False Advertising: Enough !!!

A coworker was online today and came across an Israeli add that offered “unlimited” calling for 39 NIS (Aprox. $10.00). Once clicking on the advertisement it says unlimited is 500 minutes. It amazes me how people can lie straight out. True they tell you once you click on the advertisement that it is only 500 minutes but I think companies should not be allowed to use such advertising tactics. The funny thing is that companies offer “unlimited” which they say is 5,000 minutes have a hard time from their clients.

March 26, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Terrestrial Radio: Time to wake up

EnGadget had an article on a show host who got “bleeped out” for mentioning satellite radio. It seems they realize that there is competition and they are trying to hide it all. Here is a thought “there is a reason why people are moving over” !!! Look in to why people are doing it and offer them what they want. By hiding things you are only showing that you have a lot to loose. Why not give your listeners what they want ???

October 18, 2007Dovid Bender No Comments

Outsourcing Work Over Seas

<RANT>

I have a client who recently found a vulnerability on their server (in the code, I am a gooooood sysadmin). The work was done in a different country. While I do not tell my clients where to go I hate getting phone calls at 4:00 AM that the server is down when it was the coders error (and the server is not down but rather the coders messed up). People have to learn that you get what you pay for. I am not knocking coders in other countries but I have seen my fair share of bad work done over seas. In the words of the great jbot in the #asterisk channel on irc.freenode.net

“<Dovid> ~ygwypf

<jbot> well, ygwypf is You Get What You Pay For. If the sole factor in your decision to purchase a product or service is that it’s cheaper than everything else out there, don’t be surprised if it’s also worse in every other respect than everything else out there.”

Nufffffffff said.

</RANT>