truck roll
expressionISP & telecom
Dispatching a technician to the premises - the most expensive way to close a ticket, and sometimes the only one.
Every remote diagnostic, self-install kit, and TR-069 feature exists to avoid one.
A truck roll is sending a technician physically to a site, and the phrase exists because that is the single most expensive routine event in operations. It costs travel, a scheduled appointment window, the technician's day, and the customer's time, and the total dwarfs the equipment involved in most cases.
Everything about remote support economics follows from avoiding it. Remote diagnostics, self-healing configurations, devices that phone home with telemetry, spare units shipped for the customer to swap, and long telephone conversations attempting to establish which cable is which all exist because they are cheaper than a truck. The industry's investment in remote management is not primarily about convenience.
The metric is worth knowing because it explains vendor behaviour that otherwise looks arbitrary. A device with a slightly more expensive management processor that eliminates a fraction of truck rolls pays for itself immediately, which is why enterprise equipment carries capability consumer equipment does not. It also explains why a support process seems reluctant to escalate to a visit: the person on the phone is working against a cost that is real and much larger than the call.