What do they expect ?

Just what do they expect for their subscription fee of £10 (or in some cases £12) a month ? Whilst we as an ISP do have a duty to provide a good service that is reliable, customers seem to expect:

• Low cost, ie free. With free local phone calls as well[1].

• 24 hour, 7 day a week, 52 week a year technical support line that you can always through to on the first try.... and it has to be able to solve any problem you want there and then:

  Customer:	<Ring-Ri>
  ISP:	"GrumbleSmurf Internet, how can I help you ?"
  Customer:	"Make my web access go faster"
  ISP:	"Certainly sir, I'll just have a T3 connection installed to your house There you go sir"
  Customer:	"Great, its almost fast enough now"
  Customer:	<Rin->
  ISP:	"GrumbleSmurf Internet, how can I help you ?"
  Customer:	"Bring peace to the world"
  ISP:	"Certainly sir...."

• A line (and modem) for them to connect to whenever they want.

• Bandwidth at the ISP so that they can get the maximum speed from their modem, no matter where they go on the Internet (ye, even Taiwan during the time the entire country had naught but a 64Kbit/sec link connecting it to the outside world).

• As much free web space as they can upload into.

• A list of sites with XXX "point and drool" pictures for them to download, and don't forget the warez either.

• 100% uptime... no outages, even if paddy with a spade goes through all of the ISP's links to the outside world

• EMail that is always delivered, even if the user got the EMail address hopelessly lost.

sigh you may have guessed, its being one of those weeks again.

Posted on 13th Dec 1995