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DSL Installation Fail
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an example of fine Qwest workmanship. In our business park, they just installed a DSL connection for our neighbors, for which we share an exterior utility space. They left: a DSL modem stuffed in a cardboard box, wrapped in a Wal-Mart bag, sitting outside in what will be below-zero (F) temps, on top of a bank of ten natural gas meters in some of the driest air of the year. They also left it plugged into an exposed exterior power outlet above a snowbank, with network cables running around the building, through snowbanks, coupled and protected by zip-lock baggies, and into our neighbors office. Not to mention the hack-job of patching the phone cable directly into the demarcation box. And if you're wondering — I was told upon calling them that this is not their problem, and I need to contact my primary phone service provider."
Looks like Qwest thought they had this job *sunglasses* in the bag.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Im sure they will remove the suspicious package right away...
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Seriously. Call the Fire Marshal, tell them this is what Qwest did as electrical/phone work, and ask if it meets safety standards. Try to control your laughter as you ask.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I often call to complain that my neighbor's DSL isn't set up correctly...oh, wait.
...they forgot the duct tape! How do they expect it to stay up on those gas containers in strong winter winds?!
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
When the picasa album has a real name on it?
Sorry, I call bullshit.
Note: I'm a low-voltage tech.
This kind of stuff doesn't suprise me. It's the nature of the industry. People don't want to pay $200 for a decent quality install, so a lot of the independent guys try to lowball where they can. Contractor companies will hire anyone to do the work, and they'll be lucky if they get a half a week of training. Most ISP's contract out their installs to these companies. (Mine is the exception to that fortunately.) This installer was probably never trained on this stuff, and his employer probably expected him to do it anyways or they wont use him anymore.
Quest probably leases the lines and contracts the installations through AT&T, who then contracts the installs through someone else. (Can't confirm this though.) That's why Quest told the customer to call their "primary phone service provider", although I think Quest should have done this work for them.
If you were dealing with some local company or something, this might be ok to give them one more chance to 'make it right.' However, you are dealing with a big corp. The best thing to do, to avoid unforeseen consequences, is to call the fire marshal and inquire as to who is actually responsible if there is a situation like yours (the installer or the building owner). If it is the installer, then you immediately report the situation and get an official record of it on a government piece of paper. You then take that report and fax it to them while on the phone with their secretary and tell them they need to fix it, as the fire department has documented the faulty job and you aren't sure if they are being investigated . . .but you have confirmed with the fire marshal that they would be the ones found liable in case fault is found in the installation job.
I once hired a "network technician" to install Ethernet (coax... it was a long time ago) in a doctors office. He said he was "experienced". I got a complaint from the office after he left. They had an empty office between the router and a workstation. This fool punched a hole in the middle of the wall on each side of the room and ran the wire at about neck height across the middle of the room.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Put on gloves and unplug one of the cables. Wait for them to send some one out to "repair it". Call the police and report that a suspicious person is attaching a package with wires to the gas lines.
No DSL or any other kind of electrical installation should be done outdoors unless it's in at least a NEMA 3 or NEMA 4 enclosure so it doesn't really matter what the conditions were outside that install is just all sorts of fail.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I had the same work done last week and it cam e out great.
Except for the spurious spaces it inserts into your posts once in a while. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Uh huh. Just like telephone dereguation brought me dozens of companies for my landline, and cable TV deregulation brought me dozens of companies competing to offer me cable TV.
Chortle. Guffaw.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I work for a telco... your regular local phone techs would never do this. They have procedures they follow and getting some weird-ass setup to work is not their problem. They make sure service gets to the Demarc and then they leave. What happens however is a salesman sells the customer something that's nearly impossible. Or they sell them a package they think will work without ever visiting the site. Inevitably what happens is the tech shows up, drops service off at the demarc, which happens to be some closet or outdoor space in a huge complex... the customer is literally half a mile a way and would have to pay to have cable run through the whole building. But the sales guy wants his commission. So what does he do? He shows up in person and does something like what we see here. I've actually seen worse. Then the customer calls in to complain but according to the techs records he dropped off normal service at a normal demarc. There's no record of this mess... There's arguing back and forth... but in reality the sales guys just got to prevent the customer from canceling within 30 days and the commission is his. Qwest has no idea what any of that extra cable is, and as far as anyone in their facilities division are concerned they probably think the customer ran it themselves.
Thanks for documenting this. I had a similar experience with cable a few years ago and I regret I didn't document it at the time. In my case we were renting a house next to a vacant lot, and on the other side of the lot was the curbside cable box that the installer had decided to use.
They ran the cable straight across the vacant lot in the grass and into one of our ventilation conduits to get under the house. Then, one day the cable stopped working. I could see that they were starting to develop the lot next door and a tractor had run across the cable laying on the ground. I called the provider, they came out and strung another cable across the lot, on the ground.
This was a regular occurrence in the weeks ahead. Once or twice a week I'd call that the cable was broken again, and someone would come out and patch it and drop it back in the dirt.
Then one day it stopped working again and I called again and then watched what the guy would do when he came out. They had poured concrete next door, and the cable now went from the box down into a fresh sidewalk never to emerge on the other side.
He scratched his head on that one, and just when I thought he was going to stretch a replacement cable across the new driveway, he instead went to the other side of my house, connected a new cable to the cable box over there, stretched it across part of my neighbor's lawn, diagonally across my lawn, and back through a different vent to the underside of the house, where he patched it in.
I called and told the cable company about this, that I had to disconnect the cable in order for either me or my neighbor to mow the lawn, but they said there was "nothing they could do". They said it often, and eventually, when I got on their nerves, they said it at high volume.
So we canceled the cable. I disconnected it on my side and wrapped the excess around the box. To this day I regret not documenting the experience through photos.
Later we had DSL and then fiber optic service, which were quite satisfactory. I never got an indoor DSL box installed outdoors, but they did run the line along the ground on the side of the house before punching into the bedroom I was using as an office. I didn't notice it at the time, but did notice that the network failed about a month after the air conditioner was installed. The installers had poured a slab of concrete on the side of the house for the air conditioning unit and -- you guessed it -- the cable was now part of the slab. I'm surprised it worked for as long as it did.
When we had fiber installed, I had them run it to the corner of the house closest to the curbside box (which fortunately was on my property) made sure they TRENCHED it this time, had them mount the fiber modem and router on the inside wall of the garage, and then did the rest of the network myself. So far flawless.
What I learned from this is to be sure to meet the installer outside, be sure he's called the utilities and knows where to dig, be sure he intends to trench the cables he needs to run to the house, and make sure he intends to run all other cables either along the walls well above ground level, through the basement, or through the attic.
And if they don't do these things, call the salescreature back and cancel the service. You can do that within 30 days, even if you signed a multi-year contract. By telling them you're going to cancel up front and why, you are then in a position to negotiate from strength. But if they don't fix it in a week or so, cancel in earnest and look for another provider.
Under no circumstances should an installer be allowed to work unsupervised.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I wouldn't immediately dismiss it.
I worked for an ISP for a while. And while our techies were at least halfway decent and didn't cause too many problems, the installations we outsourced to various companies were sometimes rather crude hacks. They got paid by the installation, so anything that required more than a "go in, assemble, turn on, go" would cut into their profits. And that in turn led them to quite odd practices sometimes, where cables were thrown across rooms because the installing technician didn't have enough cable with him at that time to move along the walls, network boxes that were tossed behind desks instead of being neatly screwed to walls, bent and twisted cables that weren't replaced when they accidentally dropped something on them and simply "stealing" power cables because they had two installations to do and only one working power cable with them (so they installed it at the first customer and simply swiped that cable to be able to install the other one).
I have no idea what could possibly get a tech to do a hack like this, but I wouldn't deem it completely impossible without knowing the whole story behind it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Turns out this was not Qwest after all, but another ISP in our area. My apologies to Qwest for the error.
Hello, this is Steve at Qwest. I am a manger in the social media group. We have tried contacting the poster trying to find an adress associated with this to no avail. When we go back to the posted links, the pics have been removed. If anyone knows where this is located, please let us know at talktous@qwest.com, Steve in the subject line, much appreciated! Regards Steve Q-TalkToUs www.socialmedia.qwest.com
Or he could do like I do every single day, and just do the job, and do the job right.
Unfortunately at this point the only picture to reference is the one in the slashdot summary as the original has been removed, however based on the summary description and picture, I just can't even imagine what they were thinking. I have seen some pretty creative installs though, and the usual culprit is contractors who are paid by the hour instead of by the job, if they can save 10 seconds they will, no matter what it does to the quality of the job. And management usually loves them for it, because their numbers are good... unless you include the number of repairs they cause...
I install phone, internet, and TV, including ADSL, Fibre Optics, and Satellite services. I do it in Canada, and I do it year round. Weather is not a valid excuse. I have installed satellite dishes in blizzards at -25c, I have terminated fibre optics when I couldn't feel my fingers, and couldn't keep the snow out of the mechanical splicer, and I have terminated aerial service drops at the top of a pole while soaked to the bone and feeling the line voltage through my soaked gloves, and I have NEVER cancelled or rescheduled a job due to weather.
Weather is part of the job, if you don't want to work outside in whatever the weather happens to be, you don't work as a telecommunication technician doing residential and small business installs and repairs. It's pretty much that simple.
That said, I also get to work outdoors in the sunshine in the summer, I have worked on connection boxes on the side of the road not 5 meters away from a moose with 2 calves, and I have worked on rooftops and at pole-tops with views you could sell, and I get amazing variety and no managers watching over my shoulder, I never want to work a desk job again.
This was not Qwest. Please +up this post. I cannot get Slashdot to retract.
I wouldn't deem it impossible, and would likely deem it probable.
I used to work for a large american ISP whom I am not at liberty to name. However I worked in support. We had everything from a call from a guy whose wife was in his bed at the time banging our technician to a call about a tech that took a shit while he was in the customers attic fixing some wiring.
After having worked inside one of those companies where these things get reported... I'll believe damn near anything I hear about them at this point.
Customer: your!tech!is!banging!my!wife!in!my!bed!
Support: Sir?
Customer: !!!!!!!
Support: Sir, he's a professional. So please just relax, and let him finish his installation.
Kid-proof tablet..