Microsoft phone Tech support in South America

I wish that there was a way to complain to the people at Microsoft and make them get rid of these out of country tech support people that we have to work with on the phone to get problems fixed with the Microsoft Products. These people can't speak plain English and are difficult to hear on the phone. They must work for peanuts as MS use to hire people from the USA to do this tech phone support work.


Yesterday I tried to install the new modem that my ISP gave to me in order to give me a better internet service.

The physical install was pretty simple. Unhook the cable from the old modem and screw it into the new modem. Unhook the CAT cable from the modem and router and hook up the cable from the new modem to my computer. Same with the power lines. This was the easy part. This took me less than 15 minutes and was easy to do.

What I failed to know (no manual was included with the new modem) is that this new modem also contained a router. Now I must admit that my eye sight for up close things is limited without eye glasses. I have to use 2.5 diopter reading glasses to read text on papers. And to see the computer screen 18" away I need 1.25 diopter reading glasses. So I'm constantly switching between the two different power of reading glasses. I have shirt with two pockets so that I can carry both pair or reading glasses with me where ever I go. But I was not wearing my shirt when I did this new modem install.

Now about a month ago I woke up without any internet service. Something went wrong with my ISP's service. I spend at least 12 hours that day trying to get everything fixed. I even went out and purchased a brand new Netscape Router for around $250. It turned out that my original router was ok as it was my ISP's fault. I spend the day talking to tech support from Netgear (man it was hard to find the phone number for them but MS gave me a number to call ). Then I'd call Microsoft Technical Support for help. ( I paid MS $149/yr for tech support ASSURE PLAN) Then I'd call my ISP to get tech support over the phone. (They hire people in the Phillippines to do their tech support for WOW)

Now trying to talk to someone from South American, India, or the Phillippines is hard enough. But when you are talking about technical stuff like computers and routers and Microsoft 10 softwware the language barrier is hard to take. These people sit in their cubicals next to ten's of other people with each talking to customer on their headsets. Of course the headsets are set to Voice activation mode so any sound near their mics turns on the microphone on the head sets. So I can hear 2 or 3 other nearby conversations that are turning on the mic of my tech support host at various times. Then where they put you on hold you have to listen to music that is played over and over and over again. This is enough to drive anyone nuts. Then they put you on hold for 20 minutes so that they can figure out how to fix your problem. The problem is that often they don't understand the problem and go off on a tanget. Maybe it's the fact that English is not their first language but this entire experiece is awful.

I was spitting nails after failing to get the new modem working. Turns out that around 6 pm last night (I started this around 9 am Yesterday morning) I finally called WOW and got a good tech who spoke English where I could understand him. He was working in Nicaragua down in Central America. He found out that the other WOW tech support guys/gals failed to setup my new modem propertly. They do this over the internet somehow. I guess they use my modems IP number to connect with it over the internet. Now the only phone in the house is an over the internet type phone. VOIP type phone. So if the internet /modem is not working them we have no phone other than my cell phone. Thank god for cell phones. By 7 PM I was back online again. Everything was working fine. And I learned that the new modem also has wifi built into it so I now longer have to use my NETGEAR Router.

Now part of my problem was that I was trying to use my Netgear router in between my new modem/router and my computer. After I took the Netgear router out of the network and connected my computer directly to the new modem I could get my Asus Notebook Computer to work and get on the interent.

Now that everything is working right again I'm not going to touch anything as I'm sure that I will screw it up again.

BTW: When they ship people a new modem and expect them to hook up they should at least give you the modems manual to read so you know how to do the job.