The bloody toe

Got a call back from Broadweave (Nate). Apparently, the “bandaid” was to put me on Mstar’s servers. So I’ve been moved from Veracity’s servers, where I was having problems, and moved over to Mstar’s servers, where I am (still) having (different) problems. Fortunately, we can watch the Olympics. But we watch them 80′s style, because we can’t record or pause on our set-top boxes. Apparently Luke was off today, so my emails to Luke ended up in limbo, waiting to be read, all day.

So today was sort of a wasted day. No one followed up with me, and once again, I ended up initiating contact with Broadweave. Nate suggested that at this point, he thinks the problem could be with my set-top boxes, themselves. So who knows. Moving me to Mstar’s server definitely did something. Nate said that the techs will lab this problem, tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this problem will be reproduced to the specs of my home’s environment, because to do so, Broadweave would have to discover they have a problem, call my cellphone, where they’d immediately be dropped into a voicemail message, where I’d inform them that I’m currently busy with other problems and will call them back, promptly.

So after all of the pushing and pulling between different companies, here are the functions of each, as I understand it:

1. Mstar let’s Veracity use their server when theirs doesn’t work (see above).

2. Veracity provides the servers that provide our television service and deny that they have anything to do with my service. They insist that I call Nuvont.

3. Nuvont gives me new remotes when they stop working (seriously: they replaced three, yesterday), but have been having technical difficulties, themselves, but say I have to talk to iProvo to get help.

4. iProvo provides a service, in that, they have customer service agents that can aptly refer me to Broadweave.

5. Broadweave has a few good employees, but overall, have been slow to own the problem (they did, eventually) and claimed that the problem would have to be fixed by Veracity, who will not handle residential calls.

Disclaimer: To be fair, Luke and Nate, at Broadweave, have actually done things to help me. But they are in the cogs of a machine that is slow to turn, and I ran out of patience days ago. I am now at the mercy of time and Broadweave (I think it’s Broadweave).

So, for those of you joining late, the title of this blog is no longer the issue. The “Receiving Boot String” issue is, for now, solved. However, I’m still not able to recover from pausing live television (I can pause, but when I hit “play”, the set-top box goes into a 1-2 second loop and won’t continue until I turn off the box and turn it back on). So, currently, we can’t use the pause feature, nor can we record shows or see any of the old shows that used to be on the box, prior to this issue. From what I understand, all of those shows have been lost. We’ll see.

I sent a Broadweave technician an email, earlier today, because I’d sort of given up calling Broadweave, but haven’t received any kind of response, yet. So I called, lacking any faith whatsoever that anyone would pick up. I was surprised and somewhat happy that an agent that I’d spoken to a few days before, picked up. I explained the problem that I had and he promised that he’d talk to a couple of techs and call me back.

So that’s where we stand, now. I hung up with the last tech about 10 minutes ago…

About 30 minutes after my last post, Luke emailed to tell me to reboot my Amino box. He or someone at BW had moved it to their “Customers TV” server. The long term fix, according to Luke is to reload the boxes from scratch. So in the interim, to get us through the weekend they moved the two Aminos in question to another server. Sure enough, when I rebooted both boxes, they booted up, just fine.

I noticed that all of our recordings were not listed, anymore, but that when I chose to record tonight’s Olympics schedule, I got an error that “Record Failed – Not Enough Space”. I emailed Luke about this problem and he responded with the above, stating that a reload of both boxes would fix that. I wonder if we’ll still have the recordings that we’d saved, earlier, when we reload.

So after 4 days, Broadweave got us going, albeit in a minimally functioning state. Luke has been very helpful at Broadweave, but I would say that the most frustrating thing about this whole experience has been the fact that when it comes down to me trying to contact Broadweave, it has been near to impossible, especially during the weekend.

If we can get everything working properly tomorrow, I’ll sum this thing up and move on to blogging about more interesting and positive (maybe) things.

OK, so after church, I drove back to Provo and powered down the Aminos and let them sit for a minute or two. I then powered them on, only to see the same results: See below.

First screen (normal)

Second screen (also normal)

Third screen (should not sit endlessly on “Receiving Boot String.”)

So at this point, we see that nothing has changed (so far as I can tell). This will, of course, mandate another 40 minute trip up to Alpine to watch the Olympics. We are starting to wear out our welcome at my sister in laws, but what other choice do we have? Wait another 4 years for the London Olympics?

We are, currently, at 4 days with no television, 18 hours from last contact with Broadweave, and 4 hours away from the Sunday night Olympics, which will not be playing at my house. Cannot reach anyone at Broadweave, the voicemail at BW still wants me to believe that all agents are too busy too pick up the phone, and that I should hang up to reduce call times.

Received a call from Luke at Broadweave, at 9:45 PM (who also left a comment on my last BW post). He let me know that they receive Google Alerts on blogs that mention Broadweave (I believe, especially those blogs with negative posts.) It looks as though the problem won’t be fixed until next week, sometime (early, hopefully). However, they are switching one of my Amino boxes over to (I didn’t totally understand this part) another network(?) to get us up and going.

When he let me know that they were aware of my blog and the posts that keep rolling in, I mentioned that it would be great if they responded to my phone calls the way that they respond to my blog. It really is frustrating, but it sounds like there have been some difficult things going on, that have prevented anyone from responding to me. Sort of hard to believe that that would halt any kind of communication to a customer, but Luke sounded sincere. So props to Luke for the call and for trying to do something about my problem.

So since I’m up in Alpine, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see what the results are. While I appreciate getting a call from someone who’s reading my blog, what customers need are CSR’s on the other end of the phone when they call (or someone to call back in a timely manner). So stay tuned. We’ll see how this thing all shakes out.

Called BW and left another message that I’m still waiting for someone to call me back. How about some bets? Who would like to guess when I’ll finally get a call back from Broadweave? I’ll give you a hint: I guarantee that it will be at least Monday, before I get a call back. So for those of you keeping score at home, if you’re getting in on this bet, I’d recommend low bets for the weekend and higher bets once we hit Monday.

As a sysadmin, there is not a lot of patience if I drop the ball or don’t call someone back when they make an attempt to contact me. I have, over the last 24 hours, made at least 10 attempts to contact Broadweave. This does not bode well for those who are currently under the iProvo/Nuvont/Veracty/Broadweave regime. Is this this how we can expect to be treated under the old/new company/companies? Who is providing our network? Some of you might thing that the answer is easy, but as I’ve found, these guys all claim to be NOT responsible for the issue that I’m dealing with (although, recently BW did take the responsibility for my issue). But the point is, that took two days of my troubleshooting and calling before anyone would own up to it.

The next question is this: What can Broadweave do to make this right with me? There’s no way to tell. I can’t get them on the phone to find out what they’ll do to compensate me for my time/money/frustration. I know that this is a very typical situation among ISP/Telephone/Television providers. But that does not make it acceptable. When I pay my monthly bill to have those three services, I expect those services to work. If those services don’t work, I expect to be able to contact someone that can help me. If that person can’t help me, I expect that someone will keep me notified and apprised of their progress until they can help me. If they aren’t willing to even call me back, I expect them to give me a ticket # so that I can follow up on case notes. AND OH MY GOODNESS, IF THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT, then for the love, they can keep their website up to date with current issues and an ETA of fixage. Nuvont, Veracity, and iProvo have not even come close to hitting that mark. Broadweave has two techs on staff that have offered sympathy and promised that “well get this fixed”, but to date, I AM STILL DOWN.

WARNING WARNING WARNING to those of you who are considering a move to any of these companies (expect in the case of iProvo- you’re sort of stuck with them in a lot of ways). Call their tech support and test them. See what they are willing to do to help you in a bind. See if they pick up the phone. See if their phones are even working (see earlier posts).

If anyone knows of anyone that works at any of these companies, please send my regards (a link to this blog).

The wait continues…

PS: I’m still waiting for Broadweave to deliver on their promise to get back to me, “promptly”. I’ll need to make sure I understand the common definition of the word “prompt”.

Drove 45 minutes to my sister-in-law’s home, last night, so that we could finally watch some olympics live (didn’t feel like messing with NBC’s online stuff and certainly didn’t want to take the time to set up a foreign proxy to watch.) So we watched until about 12:30 AM, fell asleep. Woke up this morning, drove us and our twin girls home, turned on the TV, rebooted the Amino box: NO LOVE.

So I called Broadweave and left a message, because all of the their techs, apparently, are working so hard on my issue that they don’t have time to pick up the phone. Love that dedication.

“Thank you for being a part of tomorrow’s technology, today, with Broadweave” is how they end the call, after telling you that in order to reduce call times you should leave your contact information and hang up. It’s an amusing thought: “Hey, our stats suck and you’d really be doing us a favor if you’d hang up so that more important customers can get through.” I can reduce my call time by hanging up. Huh. They did promise to call me back “promptly”, so the clock is starting…at 9:20 AM, Saturday morning. *sigh*

Nuvont told me that they passed my issue over to iProvo. I reluctantly hung up.

Called iProvo and spoke to Becky, who claimed that I needed to speak to Broadweave.

I insisted that I speak to her manager, but she refused, telling me that her manager can’t help.

I told her that she should, from a customer service perspective, hand the phone to a manger, and I was then placed on hold at 5:40 PM. She told me to call Mike Olson a manager at Broadweave.

A number that was given to me: 801.852-6000

Nuvont told me that they passed my issue over to iProvo. I reluctantly hung up.

Called iProvo and spoke to Becky, who claimed that I needed to speak to Broadweave.

I insisted that I speak to her manager, but she refused, telling me that her manager can’t help.

I told her that she should, from a customer service perspective, hand the phone to a manger, and I was then placed on hold at 5:40 PM. She told me to call Mike Olson a manager at Broadweave.

Mike Olson is the manager that I’m supposed to call.

Got “Greg”‘s VM when I called 801.407.6000

Sat on hold at Broadweave or iProvo (the 852.6000 #) since 5:55 PM.

A guy named Jack gave me the following numbers:

8016915800

8017698830

and he also gave me provo@broadweave.com, as if I hadn’t already pounded the websites for contact information.

Called the first # (I’ve called this one, before) and no answer.

Called the second # and…

…got Nate. He confirmed that this is an Amino 500, because it records video.

He then told me that he had to go to another part of the building to ask some techs about this issue.

He came back and told me that there wasn’t a manager on staff, only a senior tech.

It came down to Veracity, according to Nate. He told me that they would be the ones to work on this issue. I thanked Nate for his help and just overall attitude and we hung up.

At about 8 PM, tonight, I got a call from a night tech at Broadweave. He was picking up voicemails and returning calls. I let him know that I thought that Nate was a good tech and that he really seemed interested in helping me.

He confirmed what Nate said, which is that Veracity would need to fix this and that they are, indeed, working on it. He also let me know that Veracity doesn’t handle customers, only technical issues from Broadweave’s techs. So there’s where some of the disconnect comes from.

And now, when I call Nuvont, I get a message stating that they are having internal technical problems.  If they’d stayed on the line a little longer, the last time I spoke to them, I could have told them that.