We are giving this stuff away.. I guess they figured out how bad our reputation is an need to give it away. How the he-l are we supposed to make money??
18 replies (most recent on top)
Reminds me of a George Strait song....."Just give it away".
wait until the customers start dropping you because of the cr-p service they get. then all that fiber will be sitting there doing nothing.
1cwx, I didn’t say a 6yo could do it. I said a lot of WT/PT work looks like a 6yo did it. Quality of workmanship(overall) is night & day difference between the NTS/SSIM groups & the WT/PT groups. Apparently T has decided that $40/hr is what it takes to get uverse installed properly & on time since T can’t seem to keep enough WT/PTs on the payroll(even with a $4500 signing bonus) to meet the demand. Getting gigged on an inspection may be motivation for a few techs to do a better job, but overwhelmingly the “you get what you pay for” rule applies.
Pulling fiber drop or cat-6 though some of these old or newer commercial buildings existing conduit is a miracle and may need more than one tech to accomplish. The contractor placed flexible conduit diameter is usually too small to run pre-term fiber drop. the G-pon in residential areas can take hours because the terminal, aerial or buried can be far distances from the customers house depending on how many houses served from that particular fiber terminal. If labor costs are too high contact the engineers that designed that region. It’s more complicated than a novice may comprehend.
What are NTS technicians?
Leg-T C.O. and outside plant techs. Some work with AT&T Metro and install fiber connections to Business customers
Executives aren't in the business of making money for the corporation. They use the corporation as a vehicle to enrich their pockets. Last year, mobility had more new subs than the last 10 years, with heavy discounts on phones. You (management employees) get 142% bonus, executives get a way bigger cut of the pie. Profit is just one card in the house of cards.
What do you mean giving it away? Our website says it’s double the price of consumer fiber but isn’t it the same fiber? Looks like we’re price gauging small businesses, can someone explain?
Without oversight or quality control the quality of installs would fall off quickly...are you joking here? I’ve been doing installs for over 20 years and never once have I ever seen a supervisor visit a customer site to evaluate a tech’s work! They say on paper that they’re doing it on a regular basis, but it NEVER happens at least where I work! I’ve seen absolutely dreadful work performed by techs, don’t know if they’re T techs or contractors, either way the end result is awful quality work with ZERO oversight by anyone from AT&T! Disgraceful!
$40.00+/hr dude (that’s normal hourly wage BTW). If YOU were running your own business would you pay people that kind of money to unbox and place an RG on a desk, run a station wire and fiber drop/NTW, configure WiFi (like you said, a 6 year old could do that) and register/surf the internet??? You’re either blind or incredibly ignorant if you think that’s sustainable. Concerning the quality of installation work, it’s not like the SSI&M techs do great work voluntarily or have a super high degree of integrity. No sir, it’s the rigid quality control processes established by the management team and enabling you with the correct materials that accomplishes that. Without any oversight or control, the quality would fall off quickly. No doubt in my mind.
@kyp, the reason the NTS & SSIM Digital Techs(SE) got this work in the first place is because the Wire/Prem Techs couldn’t get the job done, be it from lack of skill and/or desire and/or T’s ability to keep wire techs on the payroll for whatever reasons. Either way, apparently the NTS/SSIM crews are blowing out the water when it comes to HPC/DE/revisits as compared to the Wire Techs. Also, a lot of the installs no longer look like they were done by a 6 year old. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
Well, I guess the quickest way to increase the profit margin would be to take that work away from the highest paid group 1 craft technicians (NTS techs definitely fall into that category) performing it now and send it back to premises/wire techs in all regions. We can’t contract out the OOR ABF work since the regulated transport path is all the way up to the RG so we’re stuck with horrendously overpaid union workers (NTS again) installing and maintaining non-designed broadband in that space for now. By policy, we don’t bill customers to get existing CPE beyond the RG/IAD connected when installing the service and WiFi mesh (when needed) is now MRC. I don’t think billing a customer for a wire run is going to somehow magically reduce or nullify the ungodly labor expenses we have and Customers can pay for Connectech service (one time or MRC) if they need “advanced” networking or CPE assistance if they so choose to. Perhaps you can clue us in with a few bright ideas on how to make it better Mr or Ms union tech…..keep in mind that you are busting $40+/hour normal pay to essentially run fiber drop/NTW, inside wire, place an RG and spend 10-15 min while the highly complex automation that you don’t understand magically makes it register and activate so you can surf the internet.
Network Technical Specialist=NTS
Far too little , too late. We process customer sat. credits that give the customer months and months of free service with out a single sense of the financial impact ( sometimes up to a years worth). It is not sustainable. Sales production trumps delivering a reasonable margin to the firm. Combine that with the fact that T is on that back of the wave of technology make it nothing but a shell game. If your in business markets, you just caught yourself nodding your head...
Our fiber physically is an outstanding product. I've placed, spliced and repaired fiber on a daily basis for a long time now. I always had people say when is fiber coming? I think the decisions made above my head are the root of the problems we have. There's areas in Chicago that are so dense you would think they'd jump on providing fiber to those areas immediately? They've only started pushing out recently. And only worrying about technician headcount.
What are NTS technicians?
Next up for sale: AT&T Fiber
What difference does it make, the NTS technicians now doing ABFS work have been giving CAT6 cable away for over two and a half years losing loads of revenue! The managers are clueless and are giving it away on the backs of the techs...poor d-mb
ba....ds! One group operates their way and the other group operates completely differently doing the exact same work. It’s utterly ridiculous, almost laughable and extremely poor management! What else is new!
Yeah. Let’s cut off the $500 & $1,000 per month secure point to point circuits & sell them some no contract $100 month no secure public cloud based internet service 🤦🏻♂️