orcon newsletter received

[Bart Hanson]

Orcon newsletter Highlights,

Helpdesk Overload

In anticipation of the load that our helpdesk would come under because
of our BitStream promotion and other advertising campaigns, we
increased the number of simultaneous helpdesk people on our team from
12 people to 26 over the last couple of months.

However, our call volumes have actually quadrupled because of UBS
provisioning issues, and therefore we are on the back foot at present.
Wait times on the helpdesk have increased from less than a minute to
around 1/2 an hour, and we are having difficulty getting emails
answered.

We believe that as soon as the majority of our UBS users are
provisioned, that we will have more than enough helpdesk staff and our
service levels will rise back to 'excellent'. We expect this to be
somewhere in early December, and hopefully sooner.

On 14th November, Orcon won BEST ISP at the NetGuide Web Awards as
voted by you. The team is delighted with this result. We promise to
give you plenty reasons to vote for us again next year.  We appreciate
your patience and your loyalty, thank you.

Progress
We are currently around 1/2 way through provisioning the list of
several thousand customers that we have had sign up for our UBS
service. When UBS was first proposed to us, we assumed that it would be
a fairly simple process for us to get our users moved across from
Telecom JetStream. However, this has not been the case, and the UBS
moves have been a very manual process with us having to perform many
tasks to get each customer working. Telecom is only able to move a
maximum of 90 customers across per working day, or around 3,000 per
month - we have now been moving customers over for 1-2 months.

Failed Transfers
There have been some issues with Telecom disconnecting customers from
JetStream, and then not re-connecting them to Orcon UBS. This is as
frustrating for us as for the customers. As soon as this has happened
we have begged Telecom to get customers back up and running, but in a
small amount of cases, customers have been left without a usable
connection for a week or more. We believe that we have developed a
process that minimizes these problems going forward, although we are
really at the mercy of Telecom on this issue.

Bandwidth
Some users have reported unstable ping times and throughput issues on
UBS - this is a result of the 'power' users moving to UBS first and
congesting the links between us and Telecom (which have to be a fixed
size, and Telecom won't increase for us). Based on the fact that our
JetStart service did not have problems, we expect that once the
majority of our users are moved over, these problems will go away
because the 'mom and dad' users will balance out the 'power users'. All
ISPs including Xtra have to contend with these congestion issues if
users pull too much traffic all at the same time, as the average
allocated capacity for DSL users is the same for all ISPs.

Bart Hanson (just a customer)

***@orcon.net.nz

[LEE Tet Yoon]

Post by Bart Hanson
Orcon newsletter Highlights,
Helpdesk Overload
In anticipation of the load that our helpdesk would come under because of our BitStream promotion and other advertising campaigns, we increased the number of simultaneous helpdesk people on our team from 12 people to 26 over the last couple of months.
However, our call volumes have actually quadrupled because of UBS provisioning issues, and therefore we are on the back foot at present. Wait times on the helpdesk have increased from less than a minute to around 1/2 an hour, and we are having difficulty getting emails answered.

One thing it doesn't mention but their MOTD said is that they've found a bug in their call system which is this:

"Callers are being advised incorrectly the wait time to be answered when all available trunk lines are in use. A software bug is causing callers to hear they have 1 minute to wait."

I believe some people here have encountered this so it's helpful to know they're aware of the problem

Post by Bart Hanson
We believe that as soon as the majority of our UBS users are
provisioned, that we will have more than enough helpdesk staff and our service levels will rise back to 'excellent'. We expect this to be somewhere in early December, and hopefully sooner.

This suggests they expect the backlog to be completed in early December which suggest just over 2 months... (see below)

Post by Bart Hanson
On 14th November, Orcon won BEST ISP at the NetGuide Web Awards as voted by you. The team is delighted with this result. We promise to give you plenty reasons to vote for us again next year. We appreciate your patience and your loyalty, thank you.
Progress
We are currently around 1/2 way through provisioning the list of
several thousand customers that we have had sign up for our UBS service. When UBS was first proposed to us, we assumed that it would be a fairly simple process for us to get our users moved across from Telecom JetStream. However, this has not been the case, and the UBS moves have been a very manual process with us having to perform many tasks to get each customer working. Telecom is only able to move a maximum of 90 customers across per working day, or around 3,000 per month - we have now been moving customers over for 1-2 months.

Interesting. It doesn't say but I wonder if this is only for Orcon or in total? If there are only 3000 total it doesn't say much for the success of Bitstream does it? Even if it is Orcon only, IMHO it still is quite bad news since Orcon must have at least 1/3 of the total UBS/i-UBS users, probably closer to 1/2 or more. If it only takes about 2 months to complete all the trasfers, this suggests the first wave would only be about 18k users at most! If it were 4-5 months in total to complete the backlog this would be a more decent total...

[Steve Phillips]

Post by Bart Hanson
Orcon newsletter Highlights,

[snippage]

While I am sure many of you appreciate orcon and would love to carry on
discussing the virtues (?) of this dubiously wonderful ISP and its various
business practices, I do not really believe that this has much to do with
the technical aspects of *DSL and as such would you mind taking this to
another list, preferably one I am not subscribed to.

kthnxby

[Fran]

Post by Steve Phillips

Post by Bart Hanson
Orcon newsletter Highlights,

[snippage]
While I am sure many of you appreciate orcon and would love to carry on
discussing the virtues (?) of this dubiously wonderful ISP and its
various business practices, I do not really believe that this has much to
do with the technical aspects of *DSL and as such would you mind taking
this to another list, preferably one I am not subscribed to.
kthnxby
--
Steve.

You don't think a discussion of how many customers per day Telecom can move
over to ubs/i-ubs and that this could relate to the problems some of us
have been having is in any way technical/*dsl related?

What lists are you not subscribed to (just in case)?

Fran
:):):)

[Steve Phillips]

Post by Fran
You don't think a discussion of how many customers per day Telecom can move
over to ubs/i-ubs and that this could relate to the problems some of us
have been having is in any way technical/*dsl related?

No, that all sounds like process and orcon customers bitching about
telecom/the orcon helpdesk to me.

Personally, I'm getting rather sick of the whineing, we have waited near
on 5 years for semi decent broadband, now its here you all are complaining
because its taking you an extra month/few days/whatever to get it ?
please.. its the sort of attitude a 5 yearold has when they cant get
instant gratification.

the rules are quite simple really.

a) please keep this technical.
b) if you have problems with your ISP then _move_
c) telecom are known for screwups, slow service and mucking people around,
this is no different and I'm supprised people seem to think it is - be
happy that it _will_ happen eventually. No ammount of bitching and
complaining will fix this.

any further posts on this subject should be directed at adsl-chat (I've
CC'd this there as well to make it easy for you all.)