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If one person calls with an outage they wait 15 minutes. If a lot of people from the same area call in that time period they know it’s a repeater or major trunk outage and roll a truck to the site that is down. If nobody else calls they know it’s an individual outage and roll a truck to person’s house and trace back from there.

That is how my cable co does for Internet outages. I am apparently the only one in the whole area who ever complains during outages/problems.

Every time they come out (about every 2 years), they backtrack from the back of my computer. I tell them, nothing inside the house has changed. Doesn't matter -- they spend an hour inside trying to trace the signal.

They finally go up the pole. Oppps. Problem IS down line somewhere. Gotta call another crew for that. And that crew is stationed 30 miles away.

Crew #2 shows up the next day. They start at the back of the computer, spend an hour tracing back to poll. yada yada yada.

Last major problem (Feb 08) took 4 crews and 7 days to finally isolate and fix the problem --- at the hub down the line.

I asked a couple of them whether they got other complaints of Internet problems. They always answer that mine is the only complaint they got.

If you have voice (telephony) through them as well, then they have 24 hours max to get it operational or they are in violation of FCC codes. Telephone service is a lifeline service, so you can raise a stink about that. This is something the FCC takes pretty seriously, and something I have had to invoke against comcast service in the past to get a reasonable response.

I’ve also had to tell them how to fix the problems they created on the phone tree outside my house. Funny, I haven’t had issues with my phone service since they fixed that, and I haven’t had any meaningful outages (lasting more than a few hours) since either.