Google Fiber Goes Down During World Series, Credits KC 2 Days of Service (pcmech.com)

kstatefan40 writes: Google Fiber went down in Kansas City during one of the most important times in the local market: Game 1 of the World Series between the New York Mets and the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium. Yesterday, I got an apology from them via email, and even though I wasn't home during the outage, they're making up for it by proactively giving the entire market 2 days of service off of their next bill. The rest of the industry could really learn from their customer service.

When was the last time a telecom provider gave you a discount on your bill without you asking for it? The only times I've gotten much apology from my own ISP is when I threaten (with reason) to jump ship.

Comments

If Comcast did this...

[Lumpy]

You would get an email explaining that the service interruption was a feature and your bill will go up by $22.50 from now on.

Re:redundancy

[PolygamousRanchKid]

when was the last time a whole city lost service?

All you need to cause a whole city to lose service, is a "Loose Nut" behind the steering wheel of a backhoe. You can put up a big sign saying "Do Not Drill or Dig Here!" . . . which the "Loose Nut" will interpret as an invitation to do some investigative fracking.

what does this say about the redundancy of their infrastructure?

"Loose Nuts" tend to be like Quantum entangled pairs of Schrodinger's cats: They are both digging where they shouldn't be digging at the same time, but in difference places. In highly redundant systems, "Loose Nuts" are like an Abstract Hilbert Space full of Schrodinger's cats.

This is why Einstein quipped about Quantum Mechanics, "Niels Bohr and his pals must be smoking some weird shit, because I can't make heads or tails of it." And then Bohr answered, "Chill out Al, . . . it's not heads or tails . . . it's both . . . at the same time! Hey, is von Neumann Bogarting the bong again!?"