In the last two years I have had DSL and Cable modems. I always wondered why anyone would want cable as their service for Internet. Now I know why the average user will probably choose cable over DSL. And why cable companies make more money on self service provisioning.
Until 2006 I always had DSL or T1 (yes I had a T1 in my house in the 90s). When I relocated for my new job in 2006 I chose cable since I would not have a hardwired phone.
The process for setting it up was downright simple. Attach modem to coax cable outlet and attach my wireless router to . Run installation software or call tech support. I call tech support. They asked me for my account number and found my service information. Next they asked if everything was setup. I said yes. They did a couple of tests on their end and said try access a website. Yup I had Internet.
With my job I travel a 100% of the time. So I decide to move back to Houston. This time I decided to get DSL since the new place would have a hardwired phone. The process was anything but simple and required 4 tech support calls, 1 customer service and threatening to cancel my service before I was finally up and running. What a disaster. So the first thing is customer service was down right condescending and totally follow a script and assume the person on the other end is a complete idiot. Well I work in the IT industry and I am not an idiot. Half the time the tech support person was the idiot. The scary thing was the cancellation agent knew almost as much as the line technician! I will not bore you with the details but suffice to say that my DSL provider should bring in a top notch architect to decouple setting up services from just getting the modem up and running. Apparently PPPoE requires a user id and password. OK so the modem should have a generic one built-in to the modem and when it first logs in generate a new one with a strong password. Most of the time I spent was generating a new account which when it asked my for my address again I figured out what was really going on. Marketing had designed this process in order to try and sell me more stuff and put spyware and adware on my computer. Oh and did I mention that they had to send out a technician because they script was missing a step.
So in examining this the provisioning process designed by the cable company was simple and low cost. The DSL company on the other hand made a complex process and paid the price with a higher installation cost. In the marketplace it is no wonder why cable market share is higher than DSL. And while DSL has grown in recent years this has been mostly due to massive discounts and high acquisition costs. Cable was slow to speedup their network but now speeds are faster than DSL hitting almost 10 mbs vs 6 mbs. Cable did make some mistakes in recent years and lost their commanding lead but I suspect that trend will start to reverse.
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