[lug] Comcast internet installer

[Michael Deck]

At 03:51 PM 12/1/2003, Zan Lynx wrote:
>On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 08:59, Richard Hollos wrote:
> > Thought you might find this entertaining.
> >
> > Last week a Comcast installer came to my Dad's house to install high speed
> > internet. My Dad has a Windoze and Suse dual boot machine. The installation
> > (with Windoze) went fine, but when the installer rebooted, she noticed the
> > dual boot option at startup. When she tested the download speed it was
> > slower than usual. She then concluded that the connection was slower 
> because
> > it was a dual boot system. Then she noticed that the hard drive had more
> > than one partition. She then said that the partitioning is probably making
> > the downloading slower. My brother informed her that this was impossible.
> > She was incredulous.
> >
> > Where do they get these people?
>
>Dumb, indeed.
>
>What they should be doing is what the Speakeasy installer did when he
>did my IDSL: use a company provided laptop.  His laptop had all the
>diagnostic tools installed and all the router/bridge setup software.  It
>made the installation easy for him, I'm sure, and he didn't have to
>worry about my equipment at all.  The installer also seemed like a
>bright guy with more than a day or two of training.  Probably not true
>about cable installers :-)

The Comcast guy had a company laptop when he installed my connection. It's 
possible that he would have installed _client_ software on a Windoze 
machine of mine if I'd asked him to, but I didn't. I wonder if that was 
what was happening with Richard's Dad?

My Comcast installer was pretty knowledgeable. He was reasonably aware of 
Linux and related issues, but (fortunately) his expertise was in solving 
lower-level (including physical layer) problems, of which I had many.

Comparing my IDSL (Covad and Earthlink) and Comcast installers, I'd say 
they were roughly equivalent in expertise and equipment.

-Mike



Michael Deck
Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc.