Silknet is one of Georgia’s major internet service providers and, to be fair, generally offers solid service at a reasonable price. That said, even good systems fail occasionally—most notably, Wi-Fi routers.
Silknet supplies customers with affordable ZTW 300 routers. I have no objection to that, as long as they work. When they stop working, however, the real challenge begins: contacting Silknet customer support.
What follows is a familiar journey—being transferred from one department to another, repeating the same explanation multiple times. Eventually, you reach someone from technical support, where the experience becomes… educational. The technician, whose understanding of DNS, routing, and other networking basics appears limited, begins offering guidance of the highest order: “Please restart your computer.”
When I ask whether I should do this twenty times a day, the advice remains unchanged: restart the computer.
I mention that my computer hasn’t been turned off in three months. This causes some confusion. I then explain that I have six other computers and ask if they should all be restarted as well. The answer, implicitly, is still yes.
My objective is simple: send a technician to replace a clearly faulty ZTW router with a new one. Instead, I spend another twenty minutes being told that my computer is old, my software is corrupted, and that most problems can apparently be solved via the universal “magic restart button.” For the record, the router itself has already been restarted roughly a hundred times.
After about forty minutes of discussing 192.168.1.1, ping commands, and my presumed lack of basic computing skills, I am transferred to a mysterious “Level 2” technician. This individual continues in much the same vein—until, without much explanation, performs some unseen operation and suddenly everything works.
