Re: Clearwire Broadband?

Because right now, it's not economical to officially support it.

Consider from a tech support perspective that It's a support nightmare.

There are so many variants of linux that it's hard to solve the customer's
problem "The Right Way" for the given distribution unless you just know them
all and/or have some sort of reference that you can goto quickly before the
customer gets annoyed. Sure, you may only be concerned that the connection
is up and may even know the common commands in linux to at least eliminate
the internet connection as the problem. But the customer doesn't care.
He/She wants their Internet up and reliable.. and generally, that requires
tech support to consider the customer's computer and home network in addition
to their Internet connection. This is why ISP tech support staff know just
enough about windows (and increasingly mac) and networking to solve the
common problems that they encounter (which usually are with the computer
itself). The moment you add linux to the mix you increase the amount the
underpaid tech support staff has to learn and apply... This increases costs,
especially in training.

The last reports I've read show that linux on the desktop has between a 3 to
7% market share. Are these accurate? Who knows. But hopefully we can all
agree that it's very small compared to windows. I'd speculate that
probably only a small percentage of those would be utilizing tech support
services anyway. Say, those whose family members or friends were conned into
a linux install but not support from said people... those who possibly
bought a Walmart Lindows/Linspire machine thinking they were going to be able
to run the latest and greatest windows games.. and those who truly have
lost Internet connectivity as a fault of the ISP (If you are one of these
people, I feel for you... expect the whole "reboot, and see if it comes up"
routine).

Now to close my point... Given all that, is it worth it to the ISP right
now? Would you dramatically increase the burden on yourself to officially
support an OS that only a fraction of your customer base uses? Even if you
can figure that most of them know it'll work anyway? If you answered "Yes",
I'd be interested in knowing why you think so...

- Beau

On Thursday 03 May 2007 16:19, Bob Cortez wrote:
> On 5/3/07, Lance Hankins <lhankins@ktuu.com> wrote:
> > I use it w/Ubuntu on a laptop all the time. Works just fine.
> > Lance
>
> That's great guys. Thanks.
>
> As an aside. I wonder why Clearwire doesn't promote that fact on their
> site?
>
> Bob
> ---------
> To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu May 3 23:45:23 2007