Who will fix my wired (and wireless) home?

Michael Rogers Columnist • Profile • E-mail

When I was growing up, my mother urged me to become a telephone repairman—that way, she said, I’d always have a job. A few years later, when the government broke up AT&T’s Bell System monopoly, I recalled her advice with amusement. Now, however, I’m thinking she was onto something. But it’s more than just telephones — it’s all the gadgets that hang onto our increasingly complex home networks. 

The thought crystallized early this month at a Silicon Valley conference called Connections 2007 that covers all of the wired and wireless devices and services that one might call our digital home furnishings. The conference featured a plethora of control systems for lights, heating and cooling, and security, as well as all manner of audio and video systems. There were also various home computer networks — coaxial cable, telephone or power lines, three or four flavors of wireless — that will connect all these things together.  And finally there were the companies that connect those networks to the Internet — Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, EchoStar and more.

It’s a booming business: The show’s organizer, Parks Associates, estimates that about 30 million U.S. households currently have home networks. But that number is rising quickly as families share broadband connections, move video and audio from PCs to the living room television and use the network for voice-over-Internet telephone service. 

But when things go wrong, the result can be chaos. Dad buys a new laptop which he attaches to the home network, in the process updating the network software so that suddenly the living room TV will no longer access the photos on his wife’s older desktop.  And hey, now his daughter’s computer can’t get to the Internet anymore. And the VOIP telephone system has started to chop up voices like a digital Cuisinart. So, let’s see: the laptop came from Circuit City, it was built by HP, and the software was from Microsoft. The wireless router is from Linksys, the broadband comes from Verizon and the VOIP is via Vonage. Who you gonna call? 

Running a computer network has never been simple. Over the years, big businesses have gained control of their networks by simply forbidding their employees to do much beyond adjust the angle of their monitors. But contrast that with the home network. Users buy any hardware or software they want, of any quality. They may or may not install it correctly. Even if they do install it right, it may conflict with another piece of hardware or software, slowing the network or even bringing it down. “Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show,” said one service provider at the Connections conference, “they have a whole new building filled with gadgets that people are going to try and hang on my network.”

Research shows that when networked gadgets go bad an increasing number of consumers call today’s equivalent of the good old telephone company—Verizon or AT&T or Comcast or whatever company connects you to the Internet.  In the old, telephone-only days, the service provider’s responsibility ended where the telephone lines connected to the outside of the house. Now, however, it often includes the network router, which is inside the house.

As a result, Internet service providers are getting calls from customers with what are called “out-of-scope” complaints—hardware or software issues not directly related to what the broadband provider has installed. Often the customer is likely to hear “that’s not our problem.”  In a recent survey, over a third of broadband users were unhappy with the customer service they receive from their Internet provider. Yet even the cost of even a dissatisfied customer keeps going up: a service phone call can quickly cost the service provider $10 or more, even if it doesn’t solve the problem. And the dread “truck roll”—when the company actually has to send a technician out to the home—is a big hit to the bottom line. 

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