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The 'Cable Guy' Now a Network Specialist
Hugh Pickens writes "Amy Chozick reports that cable guys, long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science and certifications in network engineering. 'Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,' says Paul Holloway, a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. 'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.' The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies in an increasingly saturated Internet-based market where growth must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. 'They should really change the name to Time Warner Internet,' says Quirino Madia, a supervisor for Time Warner Cable. 'Nine out of 10 times, that's all people care about.' Despite their enhanced stature and additional responsibilities, technicians haven't benefited much financially. The median hourly income in 2010 for telecommunications equipment installers and repairers was $55,600 annually, up only 0.4 percent from 2008."
Last time I had a comcast tech out to fix my cable modem, I had to show them how to use ping.
shows you how worthless those are, considering your partner may have just been hired cause he owned a truck and a hand drill
I don't know that the cable providers are really trying to get "Network Specialists" to do the installs? I completely agree that times are changing, and today's installer is much more likely to be bringing the connection into a home for Internet service than for simply watching TV. But the median pay doesn't sound that out of line to me, for what I think they're really looking for -- which is someone capable of efficiently driving to customer locations and following some defined procedures to hook up the cable and attach the required equipment.
The real "Network Specialists" they'd pay a lot more for would be the guys working at the "back end" of the cable company, managing the large switches handling all the traffic going out to various neighborhoods and ensuring people aren't hacking a modem in some way to get more bandwidth than they paid for. Other back end workers would be responsible for such things as rolling out firmware upgrades to the cable modems or set-top boxes on their network, testing equipment that comes back in as defective or customer returns, and keeping on top of network outages.
Just because today's customer is more sophisticated and wants to attach 15 or 20 devices to their connection doesn't mean the INSTALLER is expected to assist with any of that. My personal experience with cable company troubleshooting of issues (such as intermittent connections) tells me that if anything, they'll ask you to disconnect the cable modem from everything else and troubleshoot with only one PC connected directly to it. They don't really understand, or WANT to understand all the other things you might be trying to do with it.
I guess what the article is really saying is that now the cable companies _need_ network specialists even at the customer-facing frontline, but they're not willing to pay for them.
The cable companies around here seem to subcontract out all their install work, mostly to people who aren't good or care about their job. Verizon still has their own employees doing the Fios installs since they have to send someone up onto the pole to run the fiber from the tap into the house. The Verizon guys appear to be better trained and better paid (not surprising since they are unionized). $53k is peanuts on the coasts, but is a decent salary elsewhere in the US.
I want an hourly income of $55,600 too. I don't understand why they only work one hour a year, in their place I'd work a whole day!
installed a “wireless gateway,” transforming an unused stairwell into a control room for the modem and router that can handle at least 24 devices at 22 megabits per second.
Anybody in this business more than 5 minutes, already knows you don't need an unused stairwell to hold a little apple airport. Unused Barbie Dollhouse stairwell, then I'll be impressed. My unused stairwell has a fileserver psuedo-nas, a small 3 unit compute cluster, a vlan capable ether switch with a zillion ports, a sbc6120 pdp-8 clone with an ethernet to serial telnet converter box, one of my ipphones that connects to the house asterisk ip pbx, and yes, I wedged an apple time machine box in there as a wireless gateway too.
Also not sure about the marketing figure of 24 devices. A /28 for the customer and a /29 for the public guest network? Uh, not. Probably just pulled than number out of a completely meaningless nether region.
Another rant is you don't need certifications in network engineering such as my long expired CCNP to ... crimp a F-connector on a cable, or yank cat-5 thru a wall. I think this is one of those ever so trendy and tiresome "be glad you networking guys at least have some kind of job, because physicists and aerospace engineers are stuck driving taxis" story. Its very much like implying that you "Need" a french literature degree to be a mcdonalds fry cook because that seems to be the only job position hiring french lit grads now a days. You need the overtraining and overeducation due to intense competition and lack of jobs, not because the workload requires it.
Finally, $55K is for a national job not just flyover big cities on the coasts. In the semi-rural area where I live, three times that gets you basically my house, a nice landed estate, an upgraded non-mcmansion house, an acre or so to grow gardens or have the kids play or put up a ham radio antenna in a non-HOA neighborhood, more or less low crime, decent neighbors, great four season weather, tons of money left over for kids education, travel/vacations, excellent local schools, tech toys, gourmet food, etc. Two spouses income and if you want you can live a rather more elaborate lifestyle, like perhaps own a house on a lakeshore, or substantial land for a private hunting reserve, etc. So spare me the comments that $55K in the flyover coastal areas or Chicago means living in a cardboard box and eating mac n cheese in the park; we know that. I know that TW pay has at least a small correction factor for local cost of living. The difference in salary required for "the good life" varies across the US by darn near a factor of 10, so if you can get a mid paying job in a fantastic area, its pretty good indeed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
way above and beyond what I've needed to make sure things are done and that I won't have further problems.
So, what, they installed a weather control machine?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Last decade I worked for a cableco and we had the opportunity of free training from this place called Jones/NCTI basically a paper binder self paced training system, fax in your chapter test answers, then study the next chapter, repeat. I took a couple classes for the heck of it (although it had nothing to do with my job, we had what amounted to a free site license, where any employee could sign up and it was rubber stamp approved). The frontline techs were required to take these classes, engineering staff not required. The classes were pretty good and basically explain in great detail very clearly (modern high school level, old middle school level) more or less how not to end up in a link from Joe_Dragon on /.
Simple individual case incompetence, is probably much more likely than company wide lack of training.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
one time , i even had one ask me 'how my day was going'.
can you imagine the nerve of these servants?
to talk to me, a LINUX user, like that? and they dont even know how to disassemble their makefiles? balderdash!
I used to work in Level3 for a cable company and I can tell you that most of the techs don't even check the RF power levels on the lines half the time. Heck, I've had to send a FOREMAN out just to get someone that would actually unplug a modem to trace a simple RF problem to a splitter and have it fixed in 5 minutes or less. Forget about even expecting them to know how to check the IP address the customer was getting if they can't even take care of an RF issue that "technically" they should be experts in for all the checks they do on the lines for regular TV service all the time.
The fatal flaw of the article is that the techs they mention in it are all foreman level or supervisors. NONE of which are the regular cable techs that we all know and loath. Install techs are also better trained and have higher expectations placed on them so they are (generally) at least a little better than the average tech but still no where near being called a "Specialist" given that many of them still needed one of us to tell them how to put in a wireless key on a MAC or PC.
That being said though, the cable industry itself is changing. Gradually all cable techs will have no choice but to actually learn something or take a hike thanks to the newer technologies coming out (ex DOCSIS Set-top Gateway).