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A trip last week to the International Engineering Consortium's new Supernet confab in Santa Clara gave me a chance to check out the status of a single-product, competitive business that's suffering what must be one of the most epic product delivery failures ever: the California power utility business.
Fortunately, I was denied the opportunity. No brownouts, no flickering lights. Not even a "crisis" feel in the air (unless one was viewing some of those deer-in-the-headlights photos of Gov. Gray Davis). Too bad we can't say the same about the competitive DSL service provider community.
Regulatory snafus aside, the utilities seem to be suffering from the same capital inefficiency and single-service product palette that Cisco Systems networks executive Kevin Kennedy points out may have preordained the demise of the DLECs.
The future, Kennedy and others opine, belongs partly to the CLECs and network providers that can-among other things-deploy their capital most efficiently and capture more revenue per customer by bundling products, such as long distance voice with Internet access.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I wonder how much customer relationship management and service will play into that equation. So far, they've yet to make much of an appearance.
It gets tiresome to see, but hardly a week goes by that I don't read yet another local or national news report about somebody's lousy experience with DSL: The lengthy wait for provisioning. The problems with connections that go down and aren't brought back up again, and the "not me" response by the involved LEC, ISP and DLEC when that happens. The cutoff without warning of service to ISP customers when a service provider (Jato in this case) goes belly up.
You know it's bad when a widely read reporter such as the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg relates from personal experience how Covad and Verizon couldn't even give a consistent answer about whether his home qualified for DSL service. My own DSL experience-from install via an ILEC, DLEC and ISP to service reliability-has been pain-free, leading me to wonder what I did wrong.
Part of the service problem may be that nobody's paying attention (other than reading churn reports) to what their customers' experiences actually are. As Karen Brown's story in this issue indicates, tracking customer satisfaction with the DSL service experience apparently isn't widely done yet, either among the research and consulting firms that do such work for a living or among service providers themselves.
The results of this yawning gap between selling service and knowing what its users think are plain: DSL service quality generally seems to fall consistently behind that of cable, which itself is no day at the beach when it comes to trouble-free service.
And if the experience has been that problematic with what so far has been a primarily residential customer base, what's it going to be like when the ILECs and what's left of the DLECs make a concerted effort to land the critical mass of small- and mid-sized businesses as customers? Are the smaller enterprises that do most of the commerce in this country going to support service providers that hang them out to dry on a regular basis, especially as more providers appear to court their business with newer access technologies?
The answer is as clear as the sky over a PG&E power plant.
Afterthought: Don Quixote in the form of the American ISP Association is making the rounds, trying to spread the word about the challenges facing the thousands of independent ISPs trying to provide broadband alternatives in direct competition with the ILECs they must rely on for provisioning. Let's see, I wonder what the impact on customer service is when incumbent providers focus on shutting competitors out of markets instead of on improving their product?
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