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The difference between theory and practice...
...is greater in practice than in theory.
It's a favourite saying of mine, and it certainly applies in spades to IT.
I should be sat here typing this via my new whizzo NTL Business 20 mbit cable connection, having dumped my old Virgin 20 mbit cable connection because of intolerable levels of "traffic shaping" restricting my alleged 20 mbit connection to around 4 mbit, irrespective of ports or protocols. Monday 28th July 2008 was changeover day.
So on Monday 28th the NTL guys duly turn up with an identical Scientific Atlanta Webstar 2100 cable modem to the one already sat here.
After all, there is absolutely no technical reason whatsoever that two separate arms of the same parent company cannot share the same fibre infrastructure (and "last mile, actually last 50 yds in my case, coax) and deliver services to both domestic and business customers.
So the Virgin webstar 2100 is unplugged, and the NTL one is plugged in, the tech pulls out his mobile phone and speaks to another tech and tells him my account details and the MAC address of the new NTL webstar 2100, it doesn't work immediately so they go away saying not to worry it will propogate and go live by midnight.
What has followed since then is a tale of woe.
To be sure, when you ring NTL business you speak to an english person in england, not an indian in india who insists you reboot the modem before doing anything else, and generally speaking the support guys and gals working for NTL are more clued up, but....
They are JUST as capable as their Virgin counterparts to making promises to ring back that they do not keep, and answering questions in all sorts of manners that do not actually promise you anything concrete by any given time.
For my part I was playing it cool, thinking, "let's get the bloody connection sorted first, then screw them for some compo", because, after all, this is supposed to be a BUSINESS connection, with appropriate level of service.
So there I am on Friday (1st Aug) afternoon at 3 pm, not having heard back from the person I spoke to at 11 am who promised faithfully that they would ring me back and tell me what the hell is going on, it's time to get insistent, or a little bit anyway.
Bottom line here is NTL business just happened to have a bunch of new (router etc) hardware go live on Monday 28th, and the bottom line on that was that due to this the cable modems (new installs, new config) can get a downstream lock, but they cannot get an upstream lock and therefore cannot effectively log on to the network or accept the "poke" from the network admins to config and activate them.
Basically the problem here is one of IP addresses, both allocation and routing. The new upgraded NTL hardware isn't handling IP addresses properly... trust me to choose that week to change...
But anyway, back to the manager who I finally get through to, he admits that there is no way my connection is going to be live before the end of next week, eg Thursday or Friday 7th or 8th of Aug, and suggests before I do that a formal complaint is filed.
I agree wholeheartedly, pointing out that being unable to secure any form of connectivity is, (NTL having cancelled my Virgin account) to put it mildly, embarrassing, not merely financially inconvenient, for a business.
I dropped broad hints about the maxed out config of the NTL webstar 2100, 48 mbit down and 5 mbit up...
So how come you're reading this?
If you think it was a DOCSIS hack you're wrong, it would have worked, until I was caught, done for theft of service and banned for life, nope, you can't beat a bit of social engineering and getting the hack done by an insider, leaving your hands clean, and the bit of social engineering was speaking to a fellow tech head and telling them the truth, and by the way buddy, what's the chances of just routing my traffic through the Virgin routers and ebabling my cable modem MAC through that until NTL business can get their shit together... "hang on a minute, sending the config file now..."
So while Customer Services were busy not ringing me back, or bullshitting me when then they did ring me back or when I rang them, some lonely Tech managed to band aid the problem until it could be fixed properly, and it didn't take 3 hours of his time like Customer Services, it took 5 minutes, and got NTL a lot more patient customer.
The really funny bit is the aforementioned NTL manager, he had apparently noticed what yon tech had done, and was about to do something about it when one of HIS senior managers (who I happen to know socially and professionally) looked over his shoulder and said "Ah, I see John's account is being taken care of, well done." so the aforesaid manager gives me a courtesy call to inform me that my complaint has been lodged "at the highest levels" and was there anything else he could do for me while we both waited for my connection to be sorted next week?
So, in theory, transferring from one branch to another is easy, and in theory the practice of changing is not much different from the theory, but it practice it ain't easy at all, and in practice the gap between the practice and the theory is big enough for entire business models to disappear down, screaming, into a bottomless pit.
The only ones who get my sympathy here are the techs that do the install, they are invariably the only direct human contact between customers and the company, so they get all the crap, even though they warned against trying to roll out a new system on a live network, even though they are actually the only ones who can eventually fix things and give me my connection...