I was saying earlier that I suspect A&A staff have been run off their feet what with needing to catch-up after the long break in England and I’m far far from critical, but haven’t heard back from a human yet. Which is fine, give them time, let them get on with the important stuff and people who are actually down, and then let them get their breath back.
It would be worth it for ISPs such as A&A to pay a couple of staff members to partially cover holiday periods as it would avoid creating a backlog and an overworked Tuesday. Also if a service goes down on Thursday evening then that is four and a half days until you can get support on to it and then there may also be the time it takes to get Openreach out, with the Openreach clock not starting until some time Tuesday. So if you are really unlucky you could be down for a week.
Openreach can do better than that because iirc you can buy four hour call-out from OR (not resold by AA unsurprisingly). I can’t remember what the call-out time is in the Openreach priority maintenance - resold by AA - which I have paid for for one of my lines.
A&A don’t need to have 24 hour support staff as any business customers who might need such a thing will have their own in-house tech support and won’t need handholding anyway. But if it is an A&A fault or a BT fault then they will need to get it reported to whoever, especially through to BT in order to get the clock started sooner, if nothing else. I’m sure if someone had such needs then suitable arrangements would be made to properly accommodate them as I wouldn’t expect AA to be inflexible and robotic, as the average corporate entity can be.
Staff need to be able to have a life. If genuine volunteers, as opposed to the ‘volunteered’, are
willing to be available for a certain modest number of hours over holiday periods then fine. But I think
pushing people into working over public holiday periods and weekends would be bad, and only the truly enormous and humungous carrot of awe is the way of righteousness. Some people
like to work Sundays or even Saturdays, or would prefer to have certain weekdays off. And some people like the money.
It’s not easy. However I suspect some customers or
potential customers will need to be able start the BT or Openreach clock immediately during such a long holiday.
Some people need to have a disaster plan, what to do if say some kit goes out to lunch or a link goes down, or if some unknown bad thing happens and you don’t know what is going on. It might be a good idea if AA offered a service to help you develop such a plan. Then a conversation would be needed about support and what the customer needs in that respect. This conversation would be one way that AA could solve the problem of how to gain information about what customers truly need in support coverage.
