fiber technician

cable installer

optical manager

splicer

osp engineer

Prince-Telecom

You go to a house that was built in the '40s that hasn't had service in two decades.  The cable line needs upgrading, so you climb an old, rotting pole with the second-hand ladder provided to you.  You're now two-three stories from the ground while preparing a new cable line, fenangling with all the other lines coming from the same port, and all while taking pictures for your manager and the inspectors so you can show it looked ok when you left it. Too much risk for so little reward for me.
You run the new line to the house, and into the crawl space.  No telling what's under there; it's always a surprise. Sometimes it's the homeowners pet (or the pet's skeleton), rodent and wasp nests, a maze of tiny and sharp construction materials, or that one time there wasn't a sewage system at all and the water would just splash onto the ground every time the toilet was flushed.  Never found myself face-to-face with a snake Indiana Jones style while crawling under there, but I've hear stories. Anyway, the point is no way to guarantee your well-being while down there.
Now that there's cable in the house again, this is the point where you do most of the interacting with the customer.  Most people are well mannered.  After all, you're there to bring them something they hope to bring them joy.  A few times, they weren't so thrilled and cancel the job while you're there.  If that's the case, you gotta pack everything back up and leave without compensation for your time.  If you're very unlucky, you'll get threatened with a shotgun in the middle of running cable through their home like I was. No idea why; customer had known I was there for over an hour and was watching me like a hawk the whole time. Said for me to stop and continue no further.  I left that property and called my manager who told me I still needed to finish that assignment. I was THREATENED with a SHOTGUN!  I'm a cable guy, not a marine; what do you expect to happen?
Anyway, suppose that doesn't happen, and everything goes smoothly.  You're now spent three hours hooking up internet and WiFi. Total compensation for this job?  $15.
Get back to the office/warehouse and ask my manager about that raise he said I was going to get.  By next month, he said, though he said that every month that I asked.  Never got the money he said I was going to get.

So, I quit.  Manager seemed surprised when I told him.  I wouldn't know why he would be, most of us left after 5-6 months anyways. 
I know this is a huge rant, and you would be right to dismiss this review for heavy bias, so let me sum it up:
Working here is great temporary work for in between jobs.  You practically get the job the moment you ask for it.  However, this is not a career.  Get in, get what you need, and get out while you still have your health.

Prince Telecom is a sub-contracting company for the major cable providers. As a field tech cable installer you are expected to arrive at the shop every morning at 7am for daily meeting, then to pick up your equipment and load your truck. You must keep your truck clean and neat. Your truck is tracked by a GPS camera system that monitors you and your surroundings while driving, and if you speed, take a turn too hard, hit a bump or brake too hard the system will send a notification to your supervisor to review and if they find you were driving unsafe you will receive written warnings, and after your third warning you are suspended without pay for a certain amount of time before returning to work. After starting work for the day you do not get to finish for the day until you have completed your last call, which can be up until 9pm sometimes because dispatch will keep adding and removing calls from your board. Regardless you are still working 12+ hour shifts at times and you get paid by what is called piece rate where your jobs are worth a certain amount of points and at the end of the day you take those points and multiply it by your base rate and that is how much you were paid for that day. The only way to get paid more is by rushing jobs and getting in and out fast to get more points (more points = higher pay) which made things difficult when you were dealing with customers and even more difficult if you had to run wire throughout the house or commercial site. If you received a bad review from the customer you were docked on performance points at the shop. When working commercial job sites it was no better and it always seemed like the major cable providers pushed off all the bad job sites to prince Telecom because they did not want to handle them, such as senior care homes and rehab places that housed drug addicts and low income housing locations with terrible pest and roach issues. While the company did offer excellent benefits, the pay rate and the stress levels associated with the work environment were not worth it.

A typical day at work for me would be that I came in and first thing I logged into my computers and got my walkie talkies that I communicated with my cable technicians that were in other states with. After logging into my computers I then got in touch with the supervisors for each state that I was dispatching for that day and got the technicians that were under him for that day as well. I then printed off my daily work load sheet that let me know what all appointments my technicians in each state had and the times that their appointments were and the names and phone numbers for the clients that the technicians houses were supposed to be going too. I would also go down through the list of the customers that the technicians had appointments with for the day and I would call them and make sure that they were going to be home for the scheduled appointment time. After the technician was completed with the installation of the cable gear I would then call the customer again and make sure that the customer was completely satisfied with the job that the technician did while he was there on the job site and that everything that he did was in working order. I also completed daily/weekly/monthly spreadsheets for each state that I had where my technicians worked and the work that they completed and then turned the spreadsheets into my manager. The hardest part of the job was that at sometimes it would get very, very chaotic when all of the states I had got very, very busy and all of the technicians were calling me all at once on the walkie talkie and having trouble finding the addresses for the customers or having problems with the appointment. I just had to remember sometimes to take a deep breath, slow down and do one thing at a time because it could get very overwhelming at time very, very quickly if you let it.

Working here was a different experience. I would get in my work truck everyday to drive to the shop, load up on my equipment, turn in my paperwork, and wait for my route. Time is the key to make the money at this this job, you have to be quick in order to bring in the money you desire. Also, being a contractor for Charter Communications they expect so many things and do not care about how late you are out doing cable. I was once out till eleven at night  installing cable which I started the day at seven that morning. They also threw more work on me through out the day with out warning which made it hard on my personal life. With that being fustrating on  telling my wife that I should be done around a certain time and they continuously throwing more work on a daily basis. I do not mind working hard. I would ask them to let me know since it is a company policy for them to inform me as well as my co-worker. I usually did about 7-14 jobs a day, 6 days a week, even worked on christmas one year. The managers there had an "I do not care "  attitude which had an big effect on my co-workers and I.We worked together and tried to help each other as much as possible so we all can get done and go home at a decent time. There was no room to advance, I felt like  most of the time working against management than with them.They would rather for me or my co-workers to just deal with an issue that we have no way of fixing than take the time to help us come up with  an solution to the problem. We also had to pay gas out our pockets for using their work trucks and only get paid back $1.95 for gas per job so i was putting in $150 per week and only getting back $77 for that week. The hardest thing about the job was being out so late in the day and never having a set time to get off while  dealing with customers who lived in a unsafe development. The most enjoyable part was being out on my own working, getting the work done and satisfying the customers.

Typical day included going in at 6:30 AM to basically sit around and wait for routes to show up between 7-730 am.(Since you're paid Piece work you're essentially losing money here since you aren't installing) After checking out equipment and getting out of the warehouse, a typical day is pretty decent, but there are days where you could wait 2+ hours for a job waiting for a customer to get home and they never do, so it cancels and you get paid NOTHING other than a measly $1.75 in gas. Expect long hours most days. my average day ran from 10-16 hours depending on workload. As a single guy the income isn't bad, but if you are a family trying live on it as a single income, GOOD LUCK. Since I started and left, there have been FOUR cuts in our contract with the cable provider we work for.I went from making roughly 16-20/hr(After a month or two of getting my rhythm for the work)  when I started there, down to roughly 11-13/hr by the time I left. Soon enough I'm sure people will be making the same wage as a fry cook with 10 times the hours. Expect Mandatory 6 day work weeks with some mandatory 7 day weeks as well. If you get sick, good luck actually getting them to be reasonable, they will threaten with write-ups if you don't come in. Oh one last thing, some customers are absolutely great and will give you respect for being a service person. Then there are those customer who just treat you like dirt and will blame YOU(the tech) for the cable company's problems and errors and billing and basically take it all out on you making you wonder why you bother to help people.

TL:DR
Personally the people I worked with was great and so where most of the managers that I worked under (There's always going to be people you don't get along with), put the pay just wasn't enough to justify the work we did anymore.

I couldn't have a life outside work except maybe 2 days/wk (off days) when I wasn't tired from working 12 hours a day.

That aside, this is not a bad company. In fact, if the hours were more regulated and the piece work pay was a little better I'd probably go back. But the way it works is the MSO dumps as much work on each shop as possible and the techs are left to do it. There are some really bureaucratic things that the cable companies have set in place where something seemingly simple requires you to jump through hoops to get it done, and trouble call pay is so low if you can't do them in less than an hour you might as well just get it done and fail QC because the bottom line is more important. And also if you are doing a TC day chance is you've got 10+ of them on your route for the day so you better do them fast. Installs/triple plays are where the money is but the pay really isn't good enough for these either. If you get on the top pay scale like I was on most of the time I worked for Prince then you'll prob get a mix of installs/tc's. All that aside I was making $700-850/wk on average, not bad. 

I really enjoyed my job and interacting with people, but the ridiculous hours are why I resigned. I'm just not interested in working 7am-7(or 8)pm everyday anymore.

at 6 am i would arrive at the shop to turn in my paperwork and collect my equipment for the day, i would then spend hours driving (in which i would pay for my own gas) to different addresses where i would install or upgrade the customers cable equipment and services such as phone and internet
the customers would receive a call asking them to rate their satisfaction and after all of the orders were taken care of i would return home

learned the skills necessary to install cable, internet , and phone services

management was inconsistent as supervisors did not communicate with one another on a regular basis, most also appeared inexperienced and frazzled

co workers were encouraging though rough around the edges and provided me excellent training that i used to complete my jobs

hardest part of the job was dealing with untrained co-workers

The most enjoyable part of the job would have been meeting new people throughout the day.

Avoid this place at all costs. They bring you on as a temp and promise you all these great benefits once you become "permanent", but the problem is most people never become permanent(they just force them to keep working as temps with no benefits and low pay. Oh and you work weekends too, they make sure of it. Once every 6 weeks or so you'll get back to back off days but other than that you're there until 9 or so at night depending on what time you came in. There are 2 main managers there and both act like dictators with very unreasonable expectations. While working there I personally experience harassment from both of the managers but it's the main boss that is the worst. She will lie, cheat, manipulate or do whatever it is she has to do in order to get you to work overtime and take on a bigger work load(they had me doing the work of 3 people). The atmosphere is awful; 1 or 2 days a week the main boss would announce that it was a "no talk" day which meant that you literally didn't talk at all. If you had a work related question it had to be emailed. If you're considering this place then please for your own sanity choose any other place as Prince Telecom is nothing more than a dark pit of negativity that will drain you on all levels.

Prince itself is a decent enough place to work. I have had the pleasure of working for/with the best manager I have ever had. The money is there if you want to work hard to get it. Although they have introduced a new "safe ladder" that is more dangerous than actually being on a ladder without harness for "safety reasons." 
Being a contractor has its disadvantages. 1 being you are stuck with the same payouts that the main company gives. 2 you are at the mercy of the main companies routing on whether you get a good or bad route. 3 Charter (Spectrum) sucks to be a contractor for. 

Charter pays so little for the crazy amount of work you have to do to meet TQA expectations. On top of which it is a serious toss of the coin on whether any of your 4 TV boxes actually work or not or if the work order isn't so totally screwed up that you have to spend 1-2 hours on the phone to get anything to work. And no matter what the reason for a 'return visit' is, your repeat rates tank. Customer owned modem goes bad within 30 days? BAM theres a repeat for ya. One of Charters splitters goes bad after you leave BAM another mark. 

If you choose Prince I hope you are in the Comcast market and try to get business class asap. Business and home security are where it's at!

Could never find a better company to work for IF THE PAY WAS RESPECTABLE. The management at this location is great overall. If you are asked about job position change make sure you have the knowledge to do the job because you will be thrown in without proper training. Being production pay it’s possible to make GREAT money as long as you stay away from the aerial position. This new position requires triple the work load but no extra compensation. 

Other than that, it is by far the most amazing place to work. Management is respectful to all employees and are true representatives of FAMILY and HEALTH is ALWAYS first. My manager and team supervisors are always supportive, honest, dependable and always willing to help when needed no matter how much they already have going on. 

My manager always has work for us and  does his best to keep extra jobs ready to go so when we request an extra job or 2 it’s ready for us. 

Even with me taking the new position with the extremely heavier work load without the proper compensation I can honestly say this is the best place to work.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Fiber technician 51 salaries reported	$19.54 per hour
Cable installer 62 salaries reported	$19.07 per hour
Optical manager 65 salaries reported	$991 per week
Splicer 12 salaries reported	$23.00 per hour
Osp engineer 81 salaries reported	$60,000 per year

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