Old school technical support

I was messing with a backup server, which failed to work properly after an update. I just finished what I was doing when a call came from a strange phone number. The chap introduced himself as calling on behalf of Bell Canada, and I almost hung up (way too many phony calls!) but I am glad I didn’t: this time, the call was legit, and it concerned my Bell ADSL network connection, a service that is a bit old, a bit slow, but ultra-reliable, which is, well, the reason why I am relying on it!

He was wondering why my connection is down. I was surprised: granted, I have a higher-speed (but a tad less reliable) backup connection through Rogers so I would not lose connectivity, but still, my monitoring scripts would have warned me if there was trouble with the Bell line. But then I checked: and indeed, a few minutes prior, the Bell ADSL connection was down for a duration of about two minutes.

And they called! As it turned out, they were not sure if the connection was back up, because they were trying to ping an IP address that was not responding. We quickly sorted that out, and the chap recorded to correct IP address for the Bell equipment itself, to make sure that they know which box they ping. But we were both wondering exactly what triggered the problem in the first place.

Now I know. The backup server I was messing with at one point came up with the wrong IP addresses, conflicting with my primary server. Having two boxes with the same IP address likely confused the Bell ADSL router, which then reset itself. This is probably what they saw on their end.

But the fact that they noticed it before I did? That I received a call from a competent professional within minutes, alerting me to the problem and eager to solve it?

That’s almost unheard of, these days. My opinion of Bell Canada just went up several, several notches. This is true old school customer care. What can I say? Bravo. That VPC (virtual private circuit) ADSL line is not the cheapest, but it’s well worth the price with this level of service.

Addendum: The problem was resolved a day later. I believe it was caused by a Bell Canada residential technician, who disconnected our canceled landline service two days prior, and accidentally/carelessly hooked up some wires to the terminals that belonged to the ADSL line. So maybe my opinion of that technician is not that great. However, the business service technicians were great. Not only did they notice the problem before I did, they proactively called, addressed the problem, sent a technician… and when the technician actually called, he called only to tell me that he’d not even come to my premises, because he already identified and solved the problem, and has been monitoring the line for the preceding 30 minutes, confirming its stability.