Recently, I added TelMax as our Internet Service Provider. One of the requirements for their service is an externally accessible IP address. When the service was provisioned this past September, this requirement was satisfied. However, in the middle of this month (November), the service was switched to CGNAT. You can click on the link to learn more about CGNAT, but effectively, after their CGNAT rollout, I no longer have an externally accessible IP. This was frustrating, especially when I was in China working remotely and depended on this external IP. I understand that TelMax wants to tier their services so that a dedicated IP address is in a higher tier service. However, to make this change unannounced and unscheduled is really not professional. Their sales staff at the time also promised that an external IP will be available as part of the residential offering; clearly, it was not, so buyers beware.
Long story short, this past Friday, I called into their customer service and had my service upgraded to a business service where a dedicated IP is part of the offering. Kudos to the customer service rep who handled the migration and provisioning. This new service also gave me 4Gbps symmetrical throughput, so that is a nice to have.
Unfortunately, the service did not last, and in about four hours, the service went down. Since this happened off business hours, I called back on Saturday morning. TelMax first line support during non-business hours is effectively useless. The result of the Saturday call was, “Thank you for the information; sorry about your situation; and someone will get back to you.” Very open-ended without a commitment for a time range of resolution. You are effectively left hanging. Apparently, today I learned that it can be up to 72 hours for someone to get back to you. This is clearly not acceptable for a business account, in my opinion.
On Sunday, feeling frustrated and unloved by TelMax, I went to their online portal and wrote a lengthy support email describing my situation. Crickets, not even an auto reply email. I called them on Monday and got hold of their tier 2 support and tried to get the service back up and running. Full disclosure here. At this point, we all thought the issue was at TelMax and not with me. My firewall was working fine because the rest of my network is humming along. We even switched out the cable thinking the cable may be defective. I asked whether there is any way to verify that ethernet port labeled 10GE on the fibre modem is working or not. He told me it is working. I found it strange why there is no physical link indicator then? He decided to escalate the issue, and the call ended.
No one got back to me for the entire Monday. Today I woke up and decided to use my spare laptop to directly test the 10GE port on the fibre modem, and behold there was activity! This confirmed that TelMax equipment was fine at least electrically. The problem must reside with my equipment. I swapped out the SFP+ module with a new one and the physical connection was resolved. Whew!
Since TelMax connections are bound to the physical network interface ID (MAC address), I still had to call into customer support this morning and talked to another tier 2 support rep named Sue. She was wonderful and much more knowledgeable. A few minutes later she had it resolved by rebinding the service to the new SFP+ module’s MAC.
Take aways from these collective events:
- TelMax should not switch their networking architecture unannounced and unscheduled when it impacts existing customer experiences. I spent literally hours in China trying to resurrect services with CGNAT. Ultimately, I had to switch back to a backup Rogers connection.
- When your ISP is down, don’t assume it is just their fault even though 99% it is. 😁
- TelMax support staff’s technical knowledge can range from nothing to super helpful. On the Monday call, the staff should have advised me to use a spare laptop so that we can eliminate my networking equipment as the issue. In fairness, I should have caught this as well, but I’m a bit rusty and I am the stupid customer here.
- The TelMax support experience is too open-ended. There is no ticket, no status check, nothing.
In the end, I was in the driving seat to resolve this issue, and it was not TelMax. This is not a good customer experience. I wish TelMax would improve their support capabilities and perceptions as fast as possible. I wish them luck.