[Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?

[Jonathan C. Bailey]

You may be right.. I guess I've been out of the tech support game too long (although when I did tech support, it was an american guy providing tech support to guys with heavy pakistani accents).

Jonathan Bailey
Marshall County, Iowa
1 E Main St, Marshalltown, IA 50158
P: 641-844-2804 / C: 515-988-1021

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh More" <morej at alliancetechnologies.net>
To: cialug at cialug.org, "nathan smith" <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 12:30:33 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?

Nate,

I think that you drastically overestimate the technical understanding of
the average consumer.  :)

(This is the cue for everyone who has ever worked front-line support to
start sharing your user stories.  ;)



-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> "Nathan C. Smith" <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com> 09/08/09 12:27 PM >>>
With a 404 the first thought is "oh noes, the interweb is broken" with
an actual web page replacing the 404, it probably won't result in a call
to Mediacom.

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org 
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan C. Bailey
> Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 12:26 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?
> 
> I think that sums up their thought process... I can see the 
> DNS redirects, but I don't see how it could *ever* be a good 
> idea to mess with 404s ("I went to see billy bob's Myspace 
> page and I got a damn Mediacom screen! Myspace is broken! 
> asdhioqwerhio132e@!3!1!!!!").
> 
> -Jon
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Josh More" <morej at alliancetechnologies.net>
> To: cialug at cialug.org, tdwalton at gmail.com
> Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 12:20:34 PM GMT -06:00 
> US/Canada Central
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?
> 
> I think that the vast majority of Medicom's customers don't 
> care at all.
>  I don't think that there is any backlash worth considering.
> 
> If Mediacom works the way we all expect, they keep a few 
> people.  Let's
> be generous and say 10.  Assuming that they get $50/month 
> that's $6000 /
> year that they get to keep.
> 
> If Mediacom does redirection in a way that is more user friendly, they
> reduce call volume.  Assuming an average call worker gets $30k/year,
> which gives a total employee cost (benefits, training, etc) of
> $60k/year.  So, they only need to save that one person, one tenth of
> their time to make up for the few people that would be lost due to
> change.
> 
> Then, when you add on the possibility that a change could not 
> only save
> them call volume but also bring in ad revenue, as well as the 
> liklihood
> that the people that would move due to being upset won't actually move
> because Mediacom is the only game in town, backlash is utterly
> irrelevant.
> 
> It's more likely that they turned the "feature" off because it
> interfered with an internal process, some business client or somehow
> otherwise didn't work the way that they expected.  Remember, Mediacom
> isn't in the Internet game because they love the freedom of 
> information
> and RFCs.  They're in it because they have a lock on people via cable
> and want to make more money.  They target people who want a relatively
> reliable service for a relatively low price.  They make their money by
> charging a monthly fee and incuring as little monthly cost as 
> possible,
> which means supporting a handful of applications and operating systems
> in "normal" use only.  Anyone on this mailing list is already 
> outside of
> Mediacom's target market.  Everyone else likely won't notice a change.
> 
> (As an aside, this is also why net neutrality is a dead issue.  There
> just aren't enough people around that care about freedom to 
> outweigh the
> volume of people that just care about "good enough" and can therefore
> sustain a business model around an incomplete Internet.)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
>  morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
>  515-245-7701
> 
> >>> Todd Walton  09/08/09 12:00 PM >>>
> 
> If Mediacom is redirecting 404s, then perhaps they figure on backlash,
> and want to use it to get people to say "maybe DNS error redirects
> aren't so bad".
> 
> --
> Todd
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