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Telecommuters and Downtime?
clearcache asks: "I'm a new telecommuter. My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January. I remain employed with the same NYC company that I worked for when we lived in Jersey. Aside from the normal moving hassles, I experienced some connectivity issues due to the complete incompetence of my telephone company. These issues repeated themselves, and, due to the lack of a good problem escalation policy on their end, it took quite some time to get them resolved (some are not yet resolved!). These problems resulted in a serious loss of time on the job. When I approached the phone company to discuss compensation for downtime, they responded that, since it is a residential line, they do not compensate for downtime. With more and more people telecommuting, it's only a matter of time before the blurred distinction between 'residential' and 'business' telephone lines becomes an issue. Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do? Does anyone have any general advice about telecommuting and pitfalls that I should avoid in the future? How do the companies that you work for deal with your downtime?" When my connections to the 'net fail and I can't find someplace in the area where I can leech some bandwidth, I am forced into taking the day off. Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare. How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work?
Well the company does technically have a point that it is a residential line, etc. However I wouldn't be surprised that as things like this start to become news we don't see either a drop in the cost of business class, OR a new 'commuter' class which would hopefully be only a little more a month (than residential) and would come with some sort of uptime guarantee.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
If my net connection is down, then I go to the local library since they have internet. However, you must be careful since securtiy isn't a major issue at public places. Also another option is Internet Cafes if they are in your area, but once again you must be careful.
you might have to use dial-up and aol trial CD's while you wait for your connection to come back
You contracted with them to provide service--which is no different between residential and business accounts. If they refuse to provide a credit for an outage, contact the state regulating authority for that particular utility. You may not get a partial refund, but at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you cost them a few bucks in having to respond.
If you telecommute, your company should pay for the phone line, and get a business line. Nothing like riding the back of the phone company and then complaining when it breaks.
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
This is what Service Level agreements are for. This is also why 'business' dsl/POTS/cablemodems are more expensive. You will be hard pressed to get a SLA from a rinky-dink phone company outside of major metro areas.
Anyone who uses leased-lines (and Broadwing is really good about this) has an SLA describing in clear terms what an outage is and how the compensation is given out.
If you telecommute, then having business grade service at home is one of the costs of doing business. It may not make sense, but the only reason the phone company charges more for business lines is because of the higher SLA for downtime. Businesses lose money if their phones/data lines don't work, residents are just inconvieninced. Thats the way the phone company looks at it.
So if you professionally telecommute, the company you work for should consider the type of service you need for the home. Personally, if I plan to telecommute all the time, I request a T1 or frac-T1, not because I need the circuit (DSL is just as good) but because I need the SLA's.
If I'm just telecommuting part of the time, and have the option of going in to the office, then a regular phone line and DSL is fine for the home, because I have a backup plan for internet access.
Personally I think this is one more thing "Ask Slashdot" really won't have an answer for. The answer is to "Ask Your Boss" and see what they say.
You are using it for business. If you want the kind of service you'd expect for business purposes, you should pay for it.
I'm sure this is going against the grain of some here, who'd say that we should have perfect service on our cheap lines, or that you shouldn't have to pay additional for better service (customer service, not bandwidth). That is ridiculous. If everyone were to be prioritized the same, costs would increase (need more techs to handle faster response times) and your price would increase proportionately.
Shit happens, wear a helmet.
Get it installed as a business. You get what you pay for and typically it's good value. Especially when you're screaming at the wall because your residential DSL line just went down and you've got 2 minutes left to make a wire transfer.
High availability always costs a lot more cash. The closer to 100% you want to get, it takes exponentially more cash and resources. The phone companies understand this, which is why they rightly have no sympathy for you trying to skim a few bucks every month.
"How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work? "
Simple, I read a good book or spend time with my friends. Seriously, this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school because it is too icy out or something.
Much of the Midwest is in SBC territory since they bought out Ameritech. They have a terrible reputation for service and have been fined several times lately by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. A letter to your PUC is probably in order.
I telecommute, but I use TW RoadRunner. The service has been pretty reliable for me. I think I've had one outage of 4 hours in the past two years.
FreeSpeech.org
If your employees work from home, pay for the business line. You don't equip your office with lawn chairs either, do you?
I don't know about you, but I can probably work for a week or so without connectivity, if absolutely needed. Wouldn't be happy about it, but it could be done.
Telecommuting with the assumption of 24/7 connection through a residential line is stupid.
Either pony up the money (your company pays the connect fees in either case, of course) for a business service with guarantees, or assume you are going to be disconnected for random intervals.
Personally, I don't see the problem with using a residential line, since for reasonable blackout periods it won't affect my productivity at all.
It depends on what your work is, of course, but I would simply make sure that I can get work done even with a net outage. Mirror essential documents or code pieces locally, and you can get something done anyway. There is always documentation to write, proposals to tinker with or reading to catch up on. And if you need to talk to a colleague, there's always still the telephone...
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
How is this becomming 'blurred?' If you want guarenteed uptime, you pay for guarenteed uptime. You don't start whining and begging for it after the fact. If you're telecommuting, then it's your responsibility and your company's responsibility to sit down beforehand, and work out policies about this sort of thing, and other such issues. Do they supply you with a company machine? What do you do in the event of hardware failure? How do you handle software updates? Who pays for connectivity? What do you do if it fails? Do you have redundant connections?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'm willing to bet that your telco will only reemburse you if you have a T1 loop. T1 lines have a mandated uptime, while normal telephone lines do not. You could be w/o telephone service for days, and they don't have to lift a finger. If T1 lines were cheaper, I'm sure many people would have them pulled into their homes, I know I would. Perhaps, they have a internally mandated uptime on an ISDN Circuit, you may want to look into that. Otherwise, your up a creek without a paddle.
The ultimate backup system to me would have to be a sat. sys. Yes, it would be expensive, but to me worth it. I would try to go the extra mile if they were letting me stay home!
ryan
Maybe as a perk of telecommuting, the company could pay for a business line, or negotiate a special deal if it has a bunch of folks telecommuitng. Then the support would really be there, at least I would hope so. (heh ... right)
Home businesses would be in a different class.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
for bad service. They simply can't say that because you are residential that you don't deserve some common decency. Threaten to use the other local phone carrier that has lines running into your house. That'll show em.
/..
Seriously, though. I use ISDN and that's all my heavily populated tech-centric (Lucent, Tellabs, Molex, AT&T, etc.) suburb can get. When something happens, even having a business account for the line doesn't make them listen or act any better. It's to the point where I actually get physical symptoms when the line starts acting funny. It just freaks me out to even have to think of the hell I will have to go through once I dial that support number.
Ameritech reps won't even discuss QOS issues unless you have a couple T1's. The rep I spoke to thought I was insane for even bringing it up.
But on the plus side, when my line goes down I am saved from the other hell of viewing pop-up ads on
then cut the phone company out of the loop as much as possible. Granted, its still their copper, but there is no way around that until its their fiber, or however it turns out.
My point is this: The phone company is pretty good at phones, not so good at being an ISP. I am in a Mid-Atlantic city, and there are a few choices for DSL. Basically, figure out who the trunc provider is for the ISPs, shop around. If you need business class DSL, do not try to limp by on residential. If you go to the right ISP, you might be able to negotiate your own terms of service.
You won't negotiate with the phone company, it really does not make sense for either party involved. Find yourself an ISP that offers SDSL for residential. Ask them for references to current customers. Check up on things. If its worth it to you, upgrade to business class. Its going to be more expensive per bandwidth, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
There are a lot of ISP's that can't afford James Earl Jones advertisements, can't afford to spam you with free cd's. There are a lot of them that consist of one or two people. If that one person is good, you're set. So do your homework, shop around, and leave phone service to the phone company.
Troll Like a Champion Today
You have a RESIDENTIAL line. They're not going to sue you/disconnect you/etc for using it for some business purposes, but there are no guarantees.
I'm sure they will gladly refund the % of your montly bill for your downtime, but other than that, don't expect anything.
Want to know why a business line is 120$ for a base line when a residential one is 25$? Service expectations and guarantees.
Your residential line is for your convenience. That's why it's cheap. You don't pay much, and you don't expect much.
A business line is expensive. You pay a lot, you expect a lot.
Heh, if slashdot was an auto/truck site:
"I use my mazda sport-truck to haul three tons of gravel 5 days a week. I don't want to buy a utility truck, it's too expensive, but mazda said my warranty didn't cover the drivetrain breakdown! What's wrong with them!"
I telecommute for a small company in san jose (http://www.know-where.com), I live in Iowa, fortunately outages have been few and far between so when something like that does happen I just consider it a message from the powers that be that I have to go and do something else with my life for a little bit. My client is very understanding.
If it started happening too often, then I'd get pissed./ My ISP (frontier communications, I'd recommend them highly) has a dialup backup, if worse comes to worse, I'd just use that - or failing that, sign up with another provider. It's just one of those business expenses.
--Russell
In the UK, BT (british telecom) pays out to residential customers if your line is cut off for more than a week or two. I woulden't expect BT's terms and conditions to be nicer than other companies, this is quite a surprise!
Maybe I've been out of the loop to long. What does a CD-ROM have to do with internet connectivity? Surely all you need is a telephone number, username and password (assuming the isp endpoint is running PPP, or perhaps SLIP)? Does AOL provide these details on CD-ROM, or just some proprietary dialler/sockets software? I remember Demon internet used to sell a connection pack that included Trumpet Winsock, a sockets implementation for Microsoft Windows, but I gather recent Windows releases have built in Internet connectivity and (of course) are bundled with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
I primarily use a broadband based VPN, but have dial-up access as my backup.
If my company's VPN/remote access servers are unavailable, I keep a list of "offline" work to do that helps kill time. This usually means reading PDFs that I've downloaded, or writing emails (to be sent once I can get back online), or anything else that doesn't require connectivity.
It helps to replicate/mirror my company's internal resources too (web sites, files on file servers, databases). You need a big hard drive, but it beats the hard drive into the office (ugh... bad I know, but it's saturday).
I work for a major ISP and I here this every day. If you're out of service for 3 days, we'll give you the couple dollars for the time out of service, but there's no way in hell we'll reimburse you for the lost business time. You want to do business and have a %100 reliable connection? Two words: Frame Relay. If you don't want to shell out the cash, be happy with the near T1 speeds you get for $35/month. Your business transactions on the 'net are just important to us as the 85/yrold lady trying to get a picture of her grand-daughter's puppy. Tough luck.
I work from home and then fly out to clients for about 30 weeks a year. I cover getting disconnected by ensuring that I have all documentation that is important to the job, sample data for all parts of the project, and home access to platforms that I will be touching (UNIX, NT). I cannot afford to be just sitting around.
If I am idle and there is no coding to do I'll just start writing documentation and expense reports - the stuff I hate and leave for the end anyway.
-Ron
PS: People don't respect you when you work from home. Get used to that too. You are not allowed to have a tough day at the office.
This is very similar to the problems I had back when everything was based on a mainframe and terminals. What do you do when THE computer is down? Here's some ideas that worked, then, and some others that I've found helpful, now.
So far as I know, Murphy's Law has not yet been repealed. Expect things to go wrong. Come up with contingencies. Do what you can. (And if you can't do anything, take a vacation and make the most of it!)
If you are not already telecommuting, and are thinking of starting, be sure to discuss these issues with your employer BEFORE YOU START!
The solution seems obvious to me: get a Business line. It comes down to paying for the service you expect, and the cost difference in my experience is reasonable for basic DSL. It the same concept as getting a business phone line put into your house.
Anm
Present trends are to merge all channels of information into a bundled, $200 / mo. package.
AT&T offers cable, broadband internet, residential telephone, all on one bill of like $109 / month in my area. I think it's a good deal, but I never need long distance telephone (use cell phone on sunday for unlimited wherever calls).
My friend Tom did sign up for the AT&T deal. AT&T techs came to Tom's house, but didn't have a ladder tall enough, and refused to use the one in the garage. For the next 3 months, 2 visits a week, technicians showed up without a ladder at all. Meanwhile AT&T is sending a $109 / month bill to the house.
This is supposed to be simple, right?
Future trend looks pretty much like Ma' Bell of my childhood. I'm sure someone can graph this trend of monopolies split up and merging back together.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
The fact is that if you do use it for business and the phone company finds out they can cut you off or potentially block the service. I think on slashdot here there was a case where some ISP was cutting off its residential uses from using vpn. Most probably wont do that as they don't care. It is not worth their time to monitor what you are doing unless you start causing problems in their network. Then it is abuse.
Most decent ISP, like Earthlink/Mindspring would compensate you by refunding you the amount of time that you were down. So if you were down for 3 days they would deduct it from your next bill. Rather than you paying $50 one month you'd pay about $48 (I'm sure someone here will do the exact math). They would not compensate you for lost time at work.
Were you to get a business line then they would have to keep you up 24/7 else you could sue them for lost business income. I have seen this happen before and there is little you can do. However if you want to persue this read your Terms of Service and see if it mentions anything about this. It probably says 'your screwed if you....'
Only 'flamers' flame!
Considering that residential service in most parts of the US is still controlled by baby-bell monopolies, expecting business service to all customers may not be such an unreasonable demand.
To make an analogy, imagine that your local cable monopoly decided to offer "improved service" for an additional fee over your current cost. There would be immediate and justifiable complaints.
Yet it seems okay for the phone company to do this.
Off course, if there was true competition, there would be no grounds to require the best service for everyone. The market would take care of that itself.
Gee 20 replies and they all say the same thing, all timestamped around the same time, this brings out a fundumental problem in any high volume forum site.
What can you do about it? I don't think anything. In real life, you can't do this because you interrupt people, but on slashdot, you're only "heard" when you click submit. Therefore you don't hear other people that posted things while you were typing up your post. Anyone have any idea of what can be done?
I only bring this up because the answer to this ask slashdot has already been answered 20 times: "You get what you pay for." Have a backup link, (*gasp* dialup). Or mirror work on a home server.
While the easy solution is that employers should cover the expense of a business-class line, it doesn't seem that simple.
A business class DSL line is sufficient bandwidth for a small to mid sized office -- and many offices use just this. Managers are not likely to justify spending the cost equivalent to an entire office's connectivity on one employee. (Or worse, every telecommuting employees). In this case, managers will find that telecommuting is not saving them any money over the alternative.
A commuter-class line (as suggested in the first post in this thread) would be ideal for such a situation, but they just don't exist yet. In the mean time, I'd suggest that you find a provider who will offer a dialup until your connestion is provisioned.
-j-turkey
-Turkey
Secondly, get a business line so you have some sort of contract guaranteeing you a certain level of service. Most residential contracts don't actually guarantee you telephone service.
I'm paying the extra for 'business' dsl, which, aside from having a static /29, is the same as residential rates -- when my DSL went down at 4:30pm on a Friday, I was told the soonest a technician could look into it was Monday. Huh? If my business depends on my connectivity, I can't wait that time. Business lines are just a way to soak the customers for extra money, they won't help your service.
You're right about the VPN's, but my ISP doesn't monitor it, we just set your IP lease to an hour, when the IP renew's it usually cut's the VPN(or so I've been told). I've also heard of some ISP's that charge an additional $25/month for the ability to even use a VPN. Anyone out there use a VPN that can back me up on the IP renew/breaking the VPN's connection?
If it is that imperative that you work from home and you are that valuable to your company where downtime is inexcusable, perhaps your company should get you the tools you need to do your job (ie, pay for a business line).
If not, get your ass to work like the rest of us.
I telecommute, and I pay for a business class DSL connection w/static IPs and higher priority service. I've never had any downtime since the installation, and connectivity to the world is excellent.
I know someone across town who has the same DSL setup, except he's got residential service. Quality of service is much different, but he's paying less. He's had some outages, but nothing too serious.
If you absolutely must have the best in service, get a business class internet connection. You will not regret it.
The line isn't as blurred as you like. Telecommuting with a residential account will get you residential class uptime, bandwidth and latency. You get what you pay for. You probably chose residential because it's cheaper, and you now know why it's cheaper. If you want accountability, uptime, gaurantees, get a business class line and pay for it. Not to say that I don't think it sucks -- I do. Reliability above 95% is hard, and it costs someone.
I'd look at your phone subscriptions terms. If there's nothing about no compensation on resedential lines, it may be worth taking your phone company to small claims court. though, i'd first recommend reading my next paragraph.
also, multiple letters and phone calls to them may get something done. while it isn't the phone company, i once had several hundred dollars of small electrical stuff (lamps 'n' such - stuff they do not recommend putting surge protectors on) destroyed by an enormous by an enormous power surge (which was a big blunder on there fault, and should have known there work was going to do it). eventually, a high up suit and tie worker called me, and reimbursed the full amount of destroyed items. while that obviously not the same situation as yours, it's worth a shot using the same tactics.
What happens if the company you happen to be working for has you hired as a private consultant (ie. you pay for everything). In my case, it was stipulated in my contract that I was to calculate all expenses into my hourly rate when I accepted the job.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Ive had problems with Verizon for 5 months with long phone conversations that lasted 5 hours at a time, due to DSL problems. I completely know what you mean about bad escalation procedures.
Finally the only way that I solved my problems is when I was going to leave them and drop the line. Thats when they "suddenly" remembered the Technical Retention Team, which is sort of the elite forces of the phone company occupied by very well informed people who know the system's ins and outs and they were the only ones who actually made any sense and solved my problem in the end within 24 hours of my first contact with them.
My tip, try to get a hold of your phone company's equivalent of this retention team by threatening to drop their services and file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
I have just moved for the second time for the same employer, and have been telecommuting for the majority of my work, since day 1 of my employment. I have suffered through 3 DSL line and 1 cablemodem installs in the last 2 years. From the very first time I had high speed internet at my place of residence, I have had about a total of 5 or 6 installs. All this to say, THEY NEVER GET IT RIGHT. There are ALWAYS some sort of complication.
Also, read the contract. They ARE providing the service to your RESIDENCE. Not your place of business. Many providers of DSL and cablemodem service do offer "business accounts" which typically don't get you any more bandwidth, but do give static IP's and cost more. If you want "business quality" you are going to have to pay for it.
Service they provide for home use is designed for leisure. They make a best effort to make it enjoyable, but no guarentees. You wouldn't sue Ford if your car broke down and couldn't get you to work. So why do you expect your internet provider to pay for lost work time?
My best suggestion is for you to get over it. Really. Search out alternatives. Usually there are multiple companies that can provide DSL in your area, and of course cablemodem service is growing too. Alternate service may not be any more reliable, but at least your $$$ isn't going to the same company any more, which can send a message that if they want to keep customers, they have to improve quality.
Ultimately though, if this connection is "business critical" I suggest you get a T1 or business DSL line, that states in the contract that downtime will be reimbursed.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
First off, I have local mirrors of the code I work on. Anything goes down, I can still work disconnected. 'Yall use version control, right? You can easily integrate a fork between your own work-for-a-day and everything else, right?
Additionally, my employer has a phone bank to allow folks to dial in in emergencies. It's long distance from here so I rarely use it, but if you *really* *really* need to get that expense report in the email or grab a copy of that code you were working on, it's darned nifty to have.
Second, as everyone else says -- if you want high reliability, get your company to pay for a business-class line.
Honestly, pay for the service you expect, and don't come whinging round here if you're too cheap. This guy just *screams* "New Yorker" --- you'd know it even if he hadn't told us --- mouthy , rude and cheap.
As a telecommuter, I attempt to maximize usage of my own hardware. For example, my development machine is not very different from the deliverable hardware. So when I leave for the day, I pack my deliverable machine in its case, and take it home. I stay in touch with my co-workers via mobile phone. It dosen't really matter where I develop most of my software; however, testing is another matter. Look for positions where you don't need 24/7 connectivity. Then you should be able to bill through net downtimes.
You agreed to it when you signed up for your bandwidth. Are they violating that?
Now... also.
If you are telecommuting for real (you aren't working for yourself).. your employer should be paying for the bandwidth.
As for downtime.. if the downtime is so important, get multiple connections.
I telecommute every day. Downtime, for me, is not acceptable. I do DBA work and am on call for system engineer stuff. And, of course, if my DSL is going to fail it's going to do so right after I check in a broken stored procedure or right when the SQL server blue-screens.
So I've got enhanced residential DSL *and* a cable modem *and* a regular phone line and modem *and* a CDPD wireless modem (primarily used for travel, but also good for a backup).
I also have a backup installation of the tools I need at a friend's house who is on a different DSL provider.
If downtime is a problem, it's your responsibility to avoid it. The phone company, in this case, is absolutely right. You're paying for "gee, maybe I'll surf the net every now and then" and expecting five nines uptime.
Cheers
-b
is there? If you had a phone, couldn't you dial up? I suppose of the TelCo is responsible for your bandwidth, the phone could be out too....
Then, I guess, you might consider a cell phone, which I suppose is a telephone. And you can use that for data too in some cases (VoiceStream's iStream for one, any others?).
The only way to have a reliable anything is to make sure that you have a backup setup and ready to go. In the case of connectivity, if your main link is DSL you should have a backup dial-up connection. Preferably it should be with a different ISP, and would be even better with a different backbone provider. Test the dial-out. If you have two phone lines, make sure that you can dial-out on the non-DSL line, in case your first phone line gets disconnected. Make sure you can still get your email, and get to the servers using the dial-up.
DSL is still a relatively unreliable technology. People who need reliable remote connectivity still often use ISDN for that reason -- it may be be a bitch to set up, but once it's working it doesn't tend to flake out on you like DSL. Dial up may not be as nice as DSL, but its a heck of a lot better than nothing.
It is very, very, very difficult to feel sympathy for anyone who gets to telecommute.
i have no sympathy for you. you are the one that didn't do the research before you signed up with this broadband dealer. When i worked retail i would tell the morons that came in to buy a computer becasue everyone else on the lbock had one, that most people usually learn how to use something before they buy it. The ford dealer doesn't teach how to drive, Sears doesn't teach you how to sew, or wash your clothes. You needed to learn about broadband adn the differences in residential and business class accounts before you bought it. as mentioned in other posts you get what you payfor, adn if you paid for residential then too bad you take the shitty customer service and downtime like the rest of us.Wheni worked hel desk for an isp we had 100s of people callin in to complain about residential 56k connections going down and they could sell their UO, or Ever crack junk on eBay and there fore would not be able to make rent that month. My response everytime would be "If you are going to put your finacial wellbeing in the hands of a technology that is proven to be faulty, then you deserve to get bite in the ass and i have no sympathy for you, adn as a matter of fact i hope you cannot make your payment, adn therefore lose you house/apt and have to live on streets when you'll be used as target practice for some redneck and or gang (depending on area of the country they were from)thus removing you from society, relieveing the world of another lazy ass leech who can't take the time to do a little bit of reasearch to secure their finances." and this is why i didn't last too long at the isp hell desk. you need to grow up, take responsibilty for your own inaction, suck it up, take the loss and above all learn form this, and learn how to apply this learning to other situation so you don't make similar mistakes, for if you cannot perfore this simple task, then it's time for you to sterilize yourself. have a nice day, and thank you called the isp hell desk ;)
God forgive me but I actually resorted to the free aol trial for internet access when my cable line went down.
I also used to live in jersey and did some database work for a jersey based electrical testing company. After I moved to New Orleans I had to telecommute and so I got set up with a nice cable modem to do my daily db work. But then a month later it went down for almost an entire month. Cox (the cable company) would not compensate me for the lost work hours but did give me a month's credit.
So anyway i decided to use the aol 45 day trial to get online and do some work (I can only do so much with the dial up line). I did what I could. But I couldn't do everything I needed to until I got the cable connection back.
Interesting note however, after cancelling my free trial to aol the offered me 3 free months of the service. I refused. Next week another call again offering 3 months of free service to come back to aol. This went on for a while. Interesting buisness practices. No wonder they have so many users. They provide somany free months that people just blow off trying any other service...
- The early worm gets eaten by the bird.
OK, I think maybe your line is blurred... Yea, you're not going to get compensation for the line being down, meaning they aren't gonna PAY you anything.. but things should run like any service you're subscribing for. You AREN'T going to have to PAY while the service isn't working. You should get a credit for the downtime on your bill... that's just life, I've never paid for anything I didn't get! I know Soutwestern Bell operates that way, and I'm a residential customer.
I have been telecommuting for over three years. Forget the advice you are getting here, most of it is wrong. Even with a T1 or better you are not going to get any type of lost time guarantee. The absolute best deal I have seen is some percentage of line cost returned after an extended (as defined by the contract) outage.
Every deal is unique and residential customers are so far down the line as to be without any hope(I have dealt with Bell Atlantic, Verizon, and Bell South). My favorite comment was from the Bell South rep who, when I could only connect to the office at 13k, told me that they only guarantee 9600 baud on a residential phone line and anything better was just lucky. (It relates back to fax machines of all things.)
While that was a residential line, a business less promises faster service, rarely anything else. If you are a large company, you get very fast service and little downtime because of a service level agreement(SLA) and the ability to backbone with other choices. As a single telecommuter, you have no clout and most local service has no alternate carrier so they know you cannot leave. Feel free to write to the public utilities commission or whatever your state supports. They will tell you that under the connection agreement, there is nothing they can do.
Yes - it sucks. No - it's not fair. As the attorney for Verizon told me - they don't care. Tough to argue when they are willing to admit they could care less about what you like or don't. You could always try a two way satellite link. But that will cost you about $80/month to use as a backup and VPN is a real issue.
I work for an ISP. We only advertize for residential use, our contract states that we are only for residential use. However, we allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with the connection. If you want to use our connection to run a company, that's fine by us. BUT, our contract states that we guarantee NOTHING. If your service goes out, we will give you a proportional credit for the downtime. Nothing more. This is the reality of using residential connections for business use. We don't even guarantee any specific speed, just a 384 minimum download (our sales people seem to think otherwise, though.) Heck, the phone companys we contract through (national DSL) don't guarantee ANY speed. As long as you have a connection, most telcos won't even troubleshoot line issues for us. In fact, with some ISPs, if you tell them you're using their residential account for business use, they'll either start charging you a business rate, or they'll just cancel your account (Comcast, anyone?)
If you plan on running a business, or making money in any way off of your internet connection, purchase something that is designed for businesses, and is guaranteed. When you call your residential ISP and complain that you are losing thousands of dollars (or, my personal favorite "I had to send my five employees home without pay today, and they have kids to feed!") you're not going to get any sympathy. We sell to home users, and it's not our fault that you weren't wise enough to choose a guaranteed business connection to risk your income on.
Ask any residential ISP technician, you'll get the exact same attitude I just gave you. Yes, we are more than willing to try to help you, but if you whine and yell about the fact that the connection has been down for "two whole hours!" then don't expect us to sympathize. Getting mad at the residential technicians isn't going to help a thing. If anything, if you get a particularly bad or mean technician, he'll just blow you off for your attitude. (I always try to remain polite and professional, and always TRY to help as best I can, but some techs will just blow off annoying customers.)
And, yes, I have been responsible for a business' internet connection. Thank god the CEO listened and was willing to pay for a T1, rather than DSL...
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I work for a Telco/ISP. I have never posted here before, but for this I had to. We won't compensate anything other than part of your monthly charge...eg if you're down for a week, you get 1/4th of your monthly fee as a credit. This is the same for the residential or SOHO connections. We do not guarentee uptime, nor does your ISP I imagine. If our customers want guarenteed uptime, we offer managed contracts. These cost upwards of hundreds of dollars a month. Look at your terms of service, and ask if they offer guarenteed connections. No ISP will credit anything other than your monthly fee for your standard 40, 80, or 100 dollar per month connection. Our basic service is 40 dollar a month for a 1.5Mbps connection. We offer 24/7 service, but if there is an are wide outage, there is nothing we can do until it is fixed.
- Buy appropriate grades of products and services.
- Always avoid a single point of failure.
- Have a backup plan.
Look, if you're going to work from home, particularly primarily from home, then you've got to stop treating your home office as an extension of your home life and instead view it as a branch office of your employer. Telling your boss that you couldn't get work done because the printer broke down or the phone was out or you kid's latest computer game ate your PC just won't cut it.What part of "Residential Service" didn't you understand? How about how it differs from "Business Service"? If you want the better service you have to pay for it; going the cheapie route then complaining that you got what you paid for seems particularly inane. This is true for phone services, office products, whatever.
In this case apparently your phone line. Get cell phone service, get DSL or Broadband, invest in a VOIP service (heck the chat clients are building them in as fast as possible.) If you depend on a fax machine get two or set up your PC as a backup.
If you can't work from home then head off to a place that rents PCs by the hour (Kinko's are everywhere.) Or invest in a laptop and check into a local hotel with 'net connections for the day. Or get time at one of the shared business offices that have sprung up in many places (basically they supply the shared infrastructure and you pay rent.) Or head down to the local public library or friend's house. Don't wait for the problem to happen but be proactive and make contingency plans.
You're competing against folks working in the big office and need to meet those same levels of performance and reliability. You're already two strikes behind by not being around in person, able to chat around the cooler, open to having an on-the-spot impromptu meeting convened in the hallway. Don't make it any worse by forcing folks to jump through yet more hoops to get in touch with you, calling in with (possibly perfectly true but still unacceptable) "The dog ate it" reasons why you were unable to perform your job.
Sit down and list out what you need in order to work effectively. Now go through each item and determine what you'll do if that items fails, what alternatives you can put in place now. Whatever you do the least disruptive to how everyone else works with you is the best.
This may mean investing in a laptop. It definitely means putting a good backup (and restore!) strategy in place. It also probably calls for having some second-string hardware in case the primary fails; things like printers, fax machines, network hubs & routers, etc. Obviously phone and network connections are important so you need to arrange for alternates and make sure your co-workers know them, the company address book lists primary and backup, etc.
If you don't start treating your working at home as WORK and not just as a long day off from the office, doing what can be done from home trust me, you won't succeed. Today it was the phone, tomorrow your ISP, the next day something will fry on you. As far as you employer is concerned, as nice as they may be about it, each is an unexpected day when you disrupted plans by being unavailable and/or unproductive.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I guess I need an office here at home if I'm going to work here.
My attention span is pretty short with all my stuff around me.
Sounds like you have your solution right there. Get a commercial phone line and watch them scurry around to fix your problems or else pay you compensation.
Mattox Beckman was a black man
I telecommute several days a week. I am also on-call. My company reimburses phone/data expenses each month.
As a policy, they will not provide dedicated service (T1's, etc) but will reimburse broadband and ISDN.
I have both! The broadband is cable, which I pick up the fees for - If I was forced to a business class of cable service, my company would pick that up. The ISDN line is business class service which I usually just use for long distance phone calls but have had occasion to use as a backup when the cable was out or the VPN switch was down for maintainence. If the ISDN is out (and this has happened), the telco will have it back up the same day - that's the service level agreement. If the cable internet is out - they may say 'next week' - and I can't say a thing - it's residential. I would expect that if I paid for a business class cable connection there would be a same day SLA in place.
Are you saying your company wouldn't compensate you for the downtime? YOU approached the carrier for reimbursement of wages? HUH? Did they keep a straight face?
Think about it, a disaster recovery plan also applies to off-site operations - if your IT department is too short sighted to make recommendations and reimburse for proper service levels for telecommuters and then tell you to pound sand for wages when you loose service (say because a backhoe in bumfrik egypt cuts a fibre line), I'd seriously recommend them not offering telecommuting as an option or start looking for another job because they have bigger problems.
If you're a contractor, then you have to make redundancy part of the cost of doing business.
I live about 300 miles away from where all my business happens. So, for 2 years now, I have been a telecommuter requiring that connectivity at all times. I can certainly relate to your situation.
Early on, I did not have any option but, agg, @home. Everything was fine, but one week the thing was down. I was making a lot of money in the middle of a project when this happened. I lost considerable money. To resolve, I actually drove to the client and worked in office.
Eventually Qwest finally provided DSL to my town. As soon as this happened, I got DSL service. And I kept the cable modem for redundancy.
I should add at this point, I found the cable to be more reliable over the long run. The install was quicker and uptime was excellent, though occasionally slow. As far as tech support, cable was perfect while Qwest made me want to commit murder. Qwest's response to Code Red was pathetic and if anyone had a class action suit, I'll sign on.
So, that said, once I had two networks coming in, I had to resolve some technical issues. Not willing to spend too much time on this, I took a fairly simple approach. I bought 2 ethernet cards, of course, one for each service. I set up each card with the right network numbers for the given service. I defaulted the route to the DSL. When that service went dead, I switched it to the cable and made the service call at my leisure.
This actually came in handy many times. This means it actually saved me money.
Recently, while using my cable for months as the main route out, a city worker dug out the cable with his Bobcat, shutting that service down. It took me 10 minutes to be back up again. (Incidently, the stellar cable service here, Mediacom, had it fixed the next morning.)
I did this with a FreeBSD box acting as a NAT router. But you could also do it very easily while having it directly connected to Windows or whatever it is you use. Nice thing about doing with the NAT router is that the machines behind the server do not have to change a single thing, except re-establish things like IPSEC and ssh connections.
Hope you find this helpful.
-Slonob
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
Like all the other posts, if you want busisness class service, then pay for busisness class stuff.
However, for 'Net access I've found my cable modem (Cox) to have more than 97% up time (including the recent down time with the transition to the new network). For backup I have several dial-up accounts (MSN, and the free Juno). I mostly write code so I can work even when I don't have a connection but if I'm sending or recieving important data then I have several access methods available.
I've considered a busisness phone line, but I just haven't needed it so far.
I'm am seriously considering a busisness 'Net connection though. Mainly because I want to run my own servers. I have yet to find anything remotely affordable since my busisness consists of only one person.
Really, you might have checked out the area you moved to better. I am very careful every time I move, I make sure that I will be able to get the services I need reliably.
1. Cable Modem
2. ISDN to a different ISP
3. Analog Dialup to Company Network
4. GPRS or GSM dialup
Obviously, my company pays for all of them. The point is: if Internet access is important, have at least one backup, if not more.
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
...to get off your ass, shower, get dressed, and drive to work! Forced to take a day off? Thats bull shit. My computer still works when the network goes down. Are you saying there is nothing you can do when the network goes down? If thats true then maybe you should not be telecommuting.
Here in Iowa, the local telco offers the same speed DSL lines for residential and business class at different prices. For example, a 640/256 line without any ISP services runs $31.95 for residental or $55 for commercial.
The difference is that if your residential line goes down, you have to wait behind all the other residential customers for service. You have work to do, Mary up the street 'needs' to snipe some bids on Ebay for a rare figurine to complete her collection, Timmy next door who mows your lawn is suddenly having to take a break from his newfound interest in 'photography'. You paid the same thing they paid, but expect to be treated special.
If your line goes down for the day, all you really have the right to expect is a refund for the day's service, about 1/30th of your monthly bill. If it happens on a regular basis, the telco should expect to lose you as a customer.
If you WANT to be their customer, and WANT business class service, and WANT the speed, then pay for it. It's available.
Pick two:
Cheap
Dependable
Fast
Stuart Kahler
i work for a large cable ISP and god DAMN.. i wish i had a nickel for everytime some customer (luser) complained to me about "being down and losing $10,000 a day!!".
well damn... if you are making $10,000 a day online, then why in gods green earth are you using a $40 a month (PERSONAL USE) cable modem? why not spring the extra $20 for a back-up dial in connection?? you're making money off the thing, you should be able to put in the extra bucks it takes for a buisness class connection. or at least a back-up connection?
i just wish people would figure that one out.
I never thought it was a problem, but I monitor the support newsgroup for my ISP, and I always see people complaining about it. I've never used a VPN, so I wouldn't know. thanks again
I rarely log in to comment but this guy says he moved to a MidWestern city then later implies he is living in Blacksburg, VA. VA is on the east coast, so I'm really confused as to how it is a MidWestern city.
I used to work for several different internet providers, and one thing was the same with all of them, Their membership agreements all said that a residential line is for recreational use and no compensation will be given. If you want to work from home you will have to get a business account. afterall that does make sense, you are doing business aren't you? Read your membership agreeement and i'm sure you'll see the same thing in yours, so quit complaining and upgrade your account
When AT&T and @Home experienced the cable modem problems a few months ago, I was left without connectivity for a couple weeks. I work from home, and was unable to get anything done.
AT&T BI will not offer ANY compensation for this downtime.
Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do?
Yeah, when I worked for DSL support at Verizon, I got people like you on the phone all the time. Almost as irritating as daytraders. I told every single one the same thing:
Don't base your income on a residential service, you cheap fuck.
There's a reason a cable modem costs so much less than a T1, and the same for DSL. There's no quality guarantee. You want guaranteed uptime, you gotta pay for it.
--saint
Having gone through a similar situation with the Cox@Home to cox.net (cable broadband) conversion I can certainly sympathize with you.
In a strict sense, I think that all you can expect in the way of reimbursement is a credit on your bill for the downtime. "Work loss" is a cost that your company should expect to incur with networks run by people with only the most rudimentary knowledge and experience. After all, network/server outages "in the office" are not unknown.
It's not much use to simply sympathize. The problem is that your situation is not solitary, and as you imply, likely to become much more prevalent. So the question is: What can be done about it?
First off, we need to deal with the often artificial definition of "residential" vs. "business". I use my phone, cell phone and computer for both personal and work related activities. All of these networks are selling connection service. They are failing to provide that. In doing so, they are interfering with our use of the contracted service. There should be no difference between the "SLA" given to a business or to a resident. The service is either available and working or not. To make excuses based on the use you were going to put to is our business, not the provider's.
Placing other artificial impediments on the service based on the arbitrary definition of "residential" should also be illegal. Cox is now blocking ports 25 and 80. I've had to go through some not-so-simple manuevers just to restore my family email and website on my own computer. It also meant hassles with setting up secure communications with my office. We've already heard of ISPs blocking additional ports and VPN service. These actions materially interfere with telecommuters, and in states that have laws regarding telecommuting, these activities should be considered illegal, and therefore subject to punitive litigation.
California's Clean Air Act provides for a definition of a telecommuter and for tax incentives for businesses to encourage telecommuting. Do other states have similarly applicable laws? Shouldn't the government, acting in its, and our, best interest, do something about the misbehavior of the telecommunication companies? Or is it time for folks to take the step of filing class action lawsuits?
Connection providers need to understand that they are proactively taking steps to undermine their promise of service. They need to realize that it would be much less expensive to stop doing so, than to have it go to the courts.
Read the SLAs on business circuits. The telcos do NOT reimburse for lost revenue or productivity. You get back credit on your bill for your outage. That's it. If our T1s at work go down for more than like an hour we get back a day's credit off the bill. We don't get back money lost due to loss of communications. You won't either. That's just part of doing business like this.
You agreed to it when you signed up for your bandwidth. Are they violating that?
Now... also.
If you are telecommuting for real (you aren't working for yourself).. your employer should be paying for the bandwidth.
As for downtime.. if the downtime is so important, get multiple connections.
I work tech support for a cable modem provider from my home.
When the option to telecommute became available, Although I had a residential cable modem in my home, my employer provided a seperate "business" cable modem (same stuff, different account), as well as a business phone line,a workstation, a desk and chair.
Although uptime is not a regular issue, when I do need to call in for loss of connectivity, the business folks are harder to get ahold of than the residential folks. This is simply because the residential service has Hundreds of TSR's while the business folks end up having me leave a message and call me back. The business tech support people at least know wht a VPN is and can resolve issues quickly.
The main reason for the business account (in my lower level employee understanding)is the VPN connection which is against the AUP of the residential service. A VPN connection will use LOTS more bandwidth than a regular residentail web surfer.
with new file sharing apps and people who constantly share hundreds of files over thier residential connection, VPN bandwidth usage is not the big issue it used to be. Although lots of people run VPN over their residential line, larger usage comes from folks who keep a connection open to a file sharing network or run servers or host websites.
All in all, if I can't connect from home, I drive 20 minutes and work from the office but have only had to do this once in 2 years.
I may be partial, but, get a cable modem if you can, and use the phone line as a backup.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
As long as businesses are considered private citizens, there oughtta be a law against businesses discriminating against private individuals who are NOT businesses like this.
Residential phone lines, and therefore dsl, isdn, and whatever other services they offer, are for RESIDENTIAL use. That typically means for home entertainment purposes and not as a high availability critical business resource. This means occasionally it might go down, or bandwidth might be limited. This means they might restrict your monthly bandwidth consumption, or restrict your use of servers. If you rely on this for your business needs, then you need to pay for guaranteed uptime or at the very least get yourself an alternative internet connection. If its REALLY that important, then thats just the sacrifice you have to make.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Maybe a backup computer may be a good idea, in case you can't work anymore for whatever computer-related reason (virus, HDD crash...). And a second modem + analog line is cheap.
So...
- Always have two ISP's. Or broadband plus a dialup provider. Twenty bucks a month is annoying for an ISP I haven't called in year, so I struck a deal with my sister, configured things so I can dial in via her account in a crisis.
- Get good at wireless connectivity, like cell-phone modems. This is your contingency for losing your phone and broadband links. The bonus here is carrying a laptop and two cellphones to let you take that 15-minute essential meeting while in the middle of a day of fly-fishing or whatever. Be warned, wireless data is not fast, it's not inexpensive, and it is often flaky.
- Find the cheapest hotel/motels around with good connectivity. Honest to god, I once rented a room and worked from there for a day when a cable got cut in my neighborhood and I needed broadband speed. I was out $60, but I got 6.5 hours in. If it happened a lot, I'd probably start working a deal with some hotel for a serious discount considering they can sell a room twice in one day if I use it.
- Find other broadband hotbeds. I've patched into:
- ... and so on thru the list of Incident Response planning concepts:
- Plan for outages.
- Have local redundant copies of anything important (others have said this already).
- Don't be cheap. If Quality of Service (QOS) is important, spend the extra $50 to get business-class phone service. If your company won't reimburse, suck up and pay it yourself. Think of it as the cost of having a bigscreen TV, the ultimate chair and loud music playing 'in your cubicle.'
- Work the cellphone (without excuses!) when you're offline-against-your-will. Dodge the excuses because they only stand to hurt your case in any future discussion of the value of telecommuting.
- This last one is personal long-term QOS (Quality of Service): write letters complaining about any poor service to the apropriate regulatory agencies when your local telecom provider screws you. It seems nobody does this, so a single letter carries a lot of weight! When I got seriously burned (a full month of no phone or broadband before hookup when I moved, with unacceptably weak excuses/reasons why), I wrote a letter contesting their next request for a tarrif increase for "Customer satisfaction improvements" (HA!). The state agency estimated these tarrifs to be worth $27M over the next five years to them. They got 31 letters opposed to the increase, and rejected it based on this "significant number of complaints" (the state's words, not mine).
Yummm... an hour, a stamp, and it cost them a cool million. It makes me all warm and fuzzy even now.- a University LAN (with permission),
- used a Library kiosk,
- gotten guest account privileges at my alma mater (and had friends or relatives I was visiting do the same),
- gone to an Internet Cafe 30 miles away when the town had wind-related power failure that took out everything for miles,
- and borrowed a desk in a friend's office building, when the circumstance fit.
It's good to call ahead to ensure they're alive if you're down, though.If you are really worried about it, get a backup connection going. I have a cable connection, a dsl connection, and a 56k modem connection. Although, I have hardly ever fallen back to the 56k connection - if I need it, it's there. And, with the way some rates are going nowadays, you can get a 56k connection from a local isp for no more than a couple bucks a month - I've seen advertisements for 4.99/month service. As well, whether your local isp has rates that low or not, you can see if there is a different money saver agreement available or just work something out with the people, where you would be allowed maybe 50 hours of connection time per year - just for backup purposes - at a reduced cost.
And depending on your location, you could prolly sign up for some additional services - satellite,etc. The only problem is if your power goes out, or you are using different services that all run across the same line and the line is taken out, etc.
Still, even being able to switch back and forth between cable and dsl, or even piggy-backing the bandwidth, is pretty nice during those peak usage times.
Why the hell wasn't your company paying for a business line? Sounds like they want to get rid of you....and now they have a reason.
The Incumbent (Incompetent?) Local Exchange Carriers are regulated monopolies. Their ability to get new tariffs are dependent on your state Public Utilities Commission. If you have a problem with lousy service - write a letter of complaint to you PUC, copy the local phone company - you might actually get action. Unfortunately, the ILEC's view local phone service as a cash cow. They've been cutting back on customer service staff, technicians, and maintenance in order to lower expenses and raise profits. Consolidation of the industry has only accelerated this trend. Don't look for things to get any better any time soon, as the industry has already bought congress (*cough* Tauzin-Dingel bill).
[Insert pithy quote here]
I and many others have already posted about how anyone relying upon residential service for critical needs is a fool, however...
How many other people think that the amount of downtime they experience with their internet connection is way out of wack?
My experience with all other data services is far, far superior to that of every ISP I've had. The next worst I've had was early on with my PCS phone when I would get occasional busy messages because of the local tower being overloaded with calls. My old cable TV only once had an outage (tree branch took out the line on our block), my sattelite dish only goes out in the worst of thunderstorms, and my phone service never shows signs of interruption.
My experience has been that whole connection outages lasting several hours are common, ones lasting a day or more happen every 6 months or so. E-mail services commonly get shut down. Many other problems I could nit-pick, but they could theoretically be caused by traffic after it leaves my ISP's network.
Why do ISPs aspire to such low standards as 95-98% uptime? That's downtime of at least half a day each month. If that happened to people's electric service, it would lead the evening news, and people would be losing their jobs.
Stuart Kahler
I've been through this. It all boils down to a simple solution... the squeeky wheel gets the grease.
I had my DSL line improperly disconnected for non-payment. Funny thing was, not only did Q**** cash my check but the bank returned it to me.
I called Q**** and told them I had indeed paid, in fact I had the cancelled check right in front of me! They argued with me that I hadn't paid. I then said "Ok, fine, when was the last time you received payment."
The girl looked at another screen then said "Uhhh... oh... I see it now."
Needless to say they had torn the whole circuit down, my DSL took about a month to get reinstalled, yadda, yadda, yadda...
When it was finally back up and running I called and demanded 2 months credit. They argued that since it was a residential line it was only an inconvenience and that all they owed me was to simply not charge me for the line!
I kept complaining and then threatened to file a complaint with the public utility commission. I got the matter escallated up to a REAL manager and explained it to him this way:
If the power company turned off the electricity in your house for a month and you had to go eat at McDonalds and use a propane heater for that month... don't you think you should be entitled to SOMETHING other than a "tough luck, you're only a resident"?
The manager agreed and I was given $405.00 credit.
Anyway, her problem was that her 3 phone lines would simply not work for hours at a time... sometimes during peak business hours, sometimes days in a row. These problems I believe continued for about 3 months... she wasn't sure exactly who do contact about the problem, and after several unfulfilled promises to fix the problem from the phone company, she went through the "escalation process" and the problem was supposedly fixed... only to crop up again a few months later. This time she directly our state's PUC and the problem was "fixed" again, and so far for the past month or so, there's been no problems with her lines that I'm aware of.
What is the best way for a person in my mother's situation to get the stable connection that she really could use, without paying through the nose? All she needs is POTS that won't suffer random frequent outages, or are her only options to deal with the problem after the fact by contacting the Florida PUC (with no hope for compensation for lost wages), or pay for some sort of "business" service (despite the fact that she does not own a business and can't afford anything too fancy?)
Paul Shames instituted a class action suit against Pac Bell and SBC Internet (along with "DOES 1 through 100, which I take to be the instalation subcontractors) and won it. Payoff was (essentially) a $50 credit on the bill or a check for $20 if service had since been canceled if the installer didn't arrive in the 4-hour window.
Superior Court of San Diego County CA, Case No. GIC 751342.
That should give you a measure of what to ask for as a bill credit: $50 per extra halfday.
I'd send them a nice letter offering to waive any claim against them for your losses due to their delays, in return for a $50 bill credit for every extra halfday that they cost you due to install screwups, provided the credit appears on one of your next two bills, and referring to the case number as an example of what might happen if they don't agree.
Though the case doesn't refer to you in particular (and the claim opportunity has timed out anyhow), they might give you the credit rather than risking you might be mad enough to start another class action covering your area and time window, and thus cost them a lot more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Rather than paying through the nose for a commercial account, you may want to seriously consider having *both* DSL and a cable setup.
Make sure the cable company and your chosen DSL ISP are not on the same backbone/noc.
Although this is not perfect, I think the chances of *both* the cable and DSL being out at the same time is pretty slim and you are still going to keep it at a hundred bucks a month.
If you use a linux/bsd box for nat/masq, you can even plug the two devices in on seperate ethernet cards and write a fairly simple shell script to change your routing rules when a ping to yahoo/whatever fails.
it took me 3 1/2 months to get bellsouth to install my dsl because nobody understood what an ethernet dsl modem was. they sent me a usb modem and then they sent a tech with a usb modem in hand. neither one was helpful, but after a venting session with a manager i finally was able to establish what an ethernet dsl modem was. now i have a real network at home. cause networking with usb is just gay, when i think usb network i think of back when i played doom on 2 486's connected via printer ports. at least firewire has a cool name, thats why apple uses it. and for all you technical people who wanna start off sayin usb has this bandwidth and that and so forth, i dont like usb because its like a winmodem, it uses the cpu and does funky shit. firewire dont do such disco dancin, and neither do i.
Simple and straight foward. But it is easier to ask slashdot and have others do your thinking for you ?? My sdsl thru covad is considered business critical, costs 139.00 for 384/384 but is up or I get payed(the company that is).
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I live in Littleton Colorado, hopefully soon moving to Orlando Florida. I ordered a 640Kbps bidirectional ADSL line with Qwest Communications in August of 2001. Qwest is based here in Denver. I have noticed that AT&T has a serious strangle hold here for internet cable access, and in their home city, it almost looks like Qwest is loosing that battle. After speaking with other Denver residents, I can understand why.
I am off the Kipling and Ken Carl CO, about 17,000 feet away. My DSL line sits with about a 21.5bD signal to noise ratio and has not been offline since sometime in early November -- not for a second.
Before that though, the line was horrendous. The line would randomly loose quality, with a dropping SNR to about 4.5, and the line would randomly retrain because of complete signal loss.
I am a network engineer for a living, and so I have half a clue. I have no bridge taps, and the symptoms pointed more to something like noise injection or a loose wire punch.
I called Qwest, and three different times a technician was sent out. My line runs me about $140 every month at these speeds, with a
Some time in early November, I got tired of this and begged the apartment staff to let me into the phone room. I convinced them that I knew what I was doing and got in. This complex is absolutely new -- me being one of the first dozen residents. That wiring closet was a mess. I had to tone my line from my apartment to figure out which line was being used, and when I did, I found a loose punch facing towards my apartment. The Qwest technicians never bothered to even look. The thing was making intermittent contact and had been punched badly. I cut the line, stripped it, and repunched it. No more problems.
When the phone company is incompetent, do it yourself. In my experience, if the line works at all and still has problems, it is usually close to the customer prem, unless it is a bad line card or patch panel or something at the CO. In any event, the people at the CO usually have a clue. Outside of that though, you are talking to paid monkeys who know nothing.
Do not ask what they can do for you, break in to the wiring closet and do it yourself. Just do not screw up your neighbor's line.
Business class service is just an excuse to charge more. I'm not being flip- it's the truth. ISPs know that certain users will pay more, so they create a separate product class for that type of user. The latest crackdowns on home servers, alternate OSes, and routers are part of this strategy. They want that $100-200 that's going to Linksys. They want to cash in on enthusiasts with multiple PCs. But mostly, they know a business user who needs remote access to his home machine can probably be squeezed for a few more $$$ a month, and over the years, this really adds up.
The bottom line is, how important is this service to you, and how much are you willing to pay? ISPs have armies of MBAs working on this, and they have a pretty good idea.
How do I know this? I used to work in the marketing dept. of a major regional ISP, which was bought by a national one. We had endless meetings about different types of users, and how much per month they were each "good" for, usually in light of their other options (competition).
Ultimately, prices are set by the market. The market doesn't care what your costs are. You have little control over what you can charge. Your only leverage is blather and bullshit, which people will either buy, or they won't. If you can keep your costs low enough make a profit at a certain price point, great. If not, well, that's the gamble of being in business.
Now, of course it might cost more to provide a more reliable line. But whether or not higher reliablity is actually being provided for that higher price is arguable. In most cases it's not- the business service just costs more, and has just as many problems as the "consumer" service. Look at the systems, and the nature of outages- it's all the same network, and you're all on the same local loops. It's not like they're going to build you your own, special network for an extra $10, $20, or $50 a month.
So use your head, don't take their crap. If they're promising higher reliability, get it in writing. And read the fime print... it's usually full of weasel phrases!
Most DSL providers consider residential DSL a luxury service. It does not have gauranteed uptimes. However, they WILL give you credit on your bill for downtime, if you ask for it. They will not, however, reimburse you for any loses incurred by you due to downtime. I used to dow Verizon DSL tech support, so I've encountered this situation on countless occasions. Pushing the issue to try to get reimbursed for your lost wages is a lost cause. Your DSL provider, or at least its employees, will just laugh at you. And rightly so. If you are basing your livelihood on a $50 dollar a month residential broadband service, you deserve what you get.
If you make good money, call your provider and inquire about business class gauranteed uptime services. They will cost you a pretty penny, but the connection will likely not fail very often or at all, and you will have a case for reimbursement of lost wages if it does go down.
In other words, quit being a fscking amateur. Any professional in any field knows the value of paying for a quality set of tools, does your employer pay you to be an idiot?
.
I too telecommute, but I always have something in the queue that I can work on that's not dependent on the network. If I have a day or two that I can't connect, I'll call and leave a phone message to those who care that my connection is down, and will then work on finishing reports, scripting, and catching up on industial literature.
The explosive growth of DSL has created an interesting regulatory loophole that you might be able to take advantage of. In order to provide xDSL service, providers have to co-locate equipment in your local CO. Which is to say, they have to establish a point of presence (POP) there.
T1 circuits can be expensive--but check into how the circuits are priced. Verizon, for instance, prices the "local loop" (from you to the CO) at a flat $120 per month. If your ISP already has a POP in the local CO, you can actually get a T1 circuit to that POP for $120 per month, plus the ISP's markup. (In my case, using ChoiceOne Communications I pay $180/month.) You then pay the ISP's fee for bandwidth and Internet connection.
Doing it this way costs a bit more than a DSL connection. (Okay--quite a bit more: roughly $275/month for a 256k connection, slightly less than $400/month for a 512k connection.) But there are several substantial advantages:
Life is not perfect: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms, and we do see circuit problems when there is heavy lightning. But we've made sure that there is a fresh pot of coffee when the Verizon techs come, and that sort of thing, so they've left a spare Smart Card (the client-side device for the T1 circuit) here--when the electrical storm fries the Smart Card I just swap in a new one, place a service call, and send somebody into town to buy doughnuts. The techs will be by presently.
There are a lot of benefits to living in rural America--but there are tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that you will probably have to pay a bit more to connect, and you'll have to assume more responsibility for connecting. When that frustrates you, remember: you're no longer in New Jersey.
John Murdoch
My DSL provider has been, overall, very good. However, I recently experienced a 63 hour outage over the weekend. It seems that something happened on Friday afternoon that someone couldn't fix until they came in on Monday.
I got the run around from tech support, the telephone company repair number and never received an answer as to what was wrong.
I posted a two page later to the President of the phone company, the ISP (there is some wierd incestuous relationship between the ISP and indy telco - this aint Ma Bell), the person responsible for deciding on compensation for outage and the State PUC. That was on tuesday, I've yet to hear back from anyone on my letter, but I know they've had to have received the letters by now. I'm anxious to see what they have to say for themselve.s
recent layoffs have really pared down the ISP end of things and I think they just had nobody with a clue to work on things on the weekend. Since I'm a network admin, I'm on call 24/7/365, so I always need access. I was completely peeved about this and am waiting to see what happens.
I'm hoping I can soon find a way to get a wireless link to the town where I'm emplyed. We have roof access and if I can get radio line of sight, I'll be really happy.
Good luck to you.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
This was fantastic. Bronze-level service from GTE/Earthlink for $49.95/mo, paid for by my company, and I was able to work from home 50%. A funny thing happened: although I was going into the office sometimes 3 days per week, I was working more than 50% from home -- because I started working more and more when I was home. That's a documented problem, by the way, and flies in the face of naysayers who claim telecommuters only work bewteen Roise and Oprah (er, you know what I mean).
Then the first glitches began: the DSL started getting flaky about 6 months into the contract. Since telnet doesn't like dropped connections (!) I was losing productivity. I started going to the office more to have a stable connection. Finally, for almost 2 months the DSL route to our colocation went from LA County to the Northeast back through Dallas/Irving and to a router on the fritz which would drop packets intermittently through the day before heading to Orange County, CA. Sometimes I could walk between Long Beach and Irvine before my packets would make the trip, it seemed. I was desperate, because I treasured being at home while working and loathed the commute. I tried and tried to escalate the problem -- I knew which router needed a kick, for crying out loud! -- but nothing ever happened. While I could get to slashdot.org just fine, I couldn't get to my company's servers (there are other causes for that besides network flakiness, I know, but in this case it was *really* a router. Really).
Finally I took drastic action: I bought a laptop, a Toshiba 2805-202s, and installed Linux (initially SuSE 7.1 but eventually RedHat 7.1...then 7.2) and replicated my company's development server environment. This meant I had to get an old (and I mean OLD) legacy application running -- based on acucobol it was -- along with the webserver, application server middleware (perl/Mason and a c++ program that fed data bewteen the legacy app and the web). Then, since my work touched the back-, middle- and front-ends and since we were requiring MSIE 5+ for the corporate web application on Windows, I had to also run the same for development and testing. I chose Win4Lin and it, by God, worked. At this point I had a self-contained work environment which allowed me to fully develop and test the application I was developing without *any* Internet connectivity whatsoever. Freedom - "Free" as in "untethered."
I could write perl, change page layout and form fields, add javascript, tweak apache, compile Cobol (the joy!) all on my laptop. This solved another problem: different work computers between home and office; the continuity between work sessions was broken by the different machines, tools, monitors, keyboards,etc. Now my work environment went with me wherever I would go. Consistency is cool.
I even developed a new workstyle: no longer did I sit at a desk, but I used two chairs (not side-by-side for an ever-increasing butt) - one to sit in, the other for my feet. I positioned the laptop in my lap, feet on the chair and got down to business. To this day I don't use a desk -- and the pain that was starting in my wrists disappeared. Yeah, I'll never work again for Fidelity Investments sitting like this, but I couldn't care less.
Of course, being off-line all the time wasn't practical and I did have to sync back to the development/production servers, but I was no longer reliant on broadband for my productivity. Since this time I'm changed jobs and still am able to work the same way: a replication of my work environment on my laptop. Often I'll leave home or the office and go to a secluded place to hack out a particularly difficult problem without the distactions of being online (I think this will be post #800+ for me on slashdot ;-). My favorite place to be sequestered? A local tavern, of course!
To answer the question about getting reimbursed for lost productivity -- forget it, take matters into you own hands.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I telecommute at least 50% of the time and more than 50% of my staff (web and multimedia programmers) are full time telecommuters. The rest of my staff works from home at least part time.
Dedicated phone lines and broadband are legitimate business expenses. If your employer does not refund you for these you can claim them as business expenses in your taxes.
By having a dedicated busines phone line the phone company will have to treat you as a business, so you will probably be credited for down time. Obviously you do not want to pay twice as much for the pro version of your cable modem (for example, if you are with comcast.net you would pay twice to get the commercial version) to get the pro version just so it counts as commercial, but if the cable modem goes down (or DSL) you can dial up with your commercial phone line so at the very worst you can have email running while the broadband outage is fixed.
Now, you still have the issue of lost work. My employees understand that if anything keeps them from working from home they have to pack their laptop and come to the office. Some of them live 100 miles or more away, so over time they have made their own contingency plans. For exaple, some have convinced close family to have broadband installed. Or they may know of a close-by cyber cafe of copy shop that will let them camp out for a day with a laptop.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The author of this story is a complete ass. Want business-grade reliability and connectivity? PAY FOR BUSINESS CLASS SERVICE.
My father was tired of his earthlink dialup hanging up on him, since he used it to check work-related email at home. He upgraded his line to a 'small business' line for about 85 dollars a month. He hasn't had a problem yet (in four years).
You're just as much a little greedy whiner as the people that give @home or whatever $40 a month for service, expect commercial frame-relay reliability and connectivity, and then bitch when their T1-speed-at-8-percent-of-T1-price cable modem provider won't guarantee uptime and let them VPN into work.
If it's so fucking important that you get connected, let your company pay for an ISDN line. Better connectivity, and by law, telcos have to offer ISDN everywhere that they offer landlines.
We've been cheating the reaper as far as modem technology and connect speeds go now for about eight years; it's far from a guaranteed connection (and I do work for an ISP).
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
I do onsite service work for some extra cash.
A customer of mine who ran her business at home called me once. She uses DSL to connect to the internet.
She called and was talking in a very distressed tone... her DSL wasn't connecting and she was even to the point that she was going to go out and buy a new router because she thought that was the problem.
I went over there... played around with it for a little while. Everything seemed to work OK except the dsl router would not connect.
Called the provider.... she forgot to pay the bill =P
Boy did she feel stupid...not to mention paying me to come over and find out that everything's setup fine!
-kwishot
Your most reliable bet is probably to get a second means of access; I mean, you have several choices: dial-up, wireless, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc. And you can always pick up your laptop and head to your local Internet cafe.
Besides, you can have downtime at work, too, when you can't work. Like when the coffee machine is malfunctioning.
Recently, an australian family living out
of town lost their son
due to an asthma attack. They were unable to call
for paramedic assistance from their home
because their phone
company, Telstra, had not yet repaired a fault
with their home phone. (The father in fact tried to run to
a neighbor's phone.)
Needless to say, regardless of whether Telstra was criminally negligent, the national current affairs shows were up in arms about it.
From memory, the reports claimed that Telstra was possible up to a week overdue on the repairs and had allegedly told the family's mother to stop bothering them.
Ian
I personally have caused Indiana to lose several million dollars in tax revenue. Ameritech is one of the major reasons that people whine about the 'Indiana brain drain' where Indiana trained graduates move somewhere else to get high-paying real jobs. Can't get reasonably priced data services? Why locate in Indiana? -- simple! don't!
Move somewhere else. Get away from Ameritech since there is near zero hope that any governmental body is going to have any opportunity to get these bozos broken up or otherwise reformed. When all that is left is backwards, tiny companies that don't depend on communications then Ameritech served states might figure out it is an incompetent telecommunications company that is the problem. In the mean time, the number and length of outages is going to constantly go up and up because there is no one left inside the organization that has a clue how the system works.
-- Multics
Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare
Wow. I'd like to know where in Blacksburg you live, Cliff. I know that we got royally screwed over by Adelphia's plans to move to two-way cable, ending up being out of service for over a week in two separate incidences. This put me at least a week behind in some of my work, and got some of my clients quite irate with me.
But when I called up Adelphia to tel lthem of my situation, the following quote "Our service is intended for personal use only, and is not guaranteed for any "profit-making ventures"". Now the fact that I actually worked for Adelphia for a while so I had the inner hand in who to talk to didn't make a difference here...this was their policy and we were screwed.
As far as Blacksburg goes, if you have in-apartment ethernet, you're golden. Things otherwise have gotten better...but it has defintely had its rough spots.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
See it as a blessing instead of a curse. We're all working too much. I do see your point though. Mindspring keeps me up 99% of the time and my client is really understanding when the DSL does go down.
Are you referring to crazy dutch country, or the rest of iowa?
my cable modem, telephone and cable were all handled by the same company: rcn.
when i had a downtime during installation (i was down for 2 weeks, i requested an account in my name and when the idiot girls [who still get mail at my address] cancelled their account, they cancelled mine)...
all you have to do is complain enough and you'll get the droppings life gives to those of us who bitch... 2 months free service. yay.
alot of good that does you if you break a leg and can't call 911...
aren't there more consumer protection laws than "oh well, go use someone else"?
First, the phone company/cable company will drop your connection. (just give it time)....
So
Rule #1. Find the closest large library you can. They all have bandwidth, and dont seem to mind if I plug my laptop in and work all day in a quiet corner. (just hold the phone calls). Its quiet, and a refreshing break from the house.
Rule #2. Damn sure better have a dial up account with somebody!
Rule #3. if rule one fails, keep searching, university libraries usually have networks you can slighly swipe the networks cable from, switch to DHCP, and your on the network.(incidentally, great place to hack from.) You cant be on these all day, but long enough to DL/UL your warez.
Rule #4. Your connection will drop(see above) so getting setup on vpn or static ip access only is not really practical all the time, so use ssh, or some other method to get a secure connect.
GOOD LUCK!!!!
usually an ISDN line is treated as a business service. You get prompt weeked/holiday response. cost of the line can range anywhere from 40 to 80 a month from the telco. not counting the cost of the isp service which i am sure you could get your company to pay for.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
I too do a great deal of telecommuting, or as I say, "bathrobe office work," and have a DSL through VZ/Earthlink. They offer business plans for home users that are simply upgraded service packages (IP's, less throttling at the dlsam, etc) but no where was I able to get any type of service level agreement from them, short of having VZ actually run fiber into my home.
However, if residence was zoned as commercial, (duh) Comcast/Excite WILL provide a DSL SLA... but not if it's a home office.
WTF!?
I wonder if they think the presence of cats rather then a bumbling night guard past their Dmark is more of a service risk to their pocketbooks.
How about 4 miles outside of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, adjacent to a state park? We don't live in a city--we're in a Class III township in eastern Pennsylvania. The northern boundary of the township is the Appalachian Trail.
The point remains: if you need better reliability than you can get from residential-class service, you can pay to get it. If you're a contractor, then you do indeed need to factor that cost into your rate. I'm a contractor myself, and there are costs of doing business that way; I have to cover my own insurance, etc. It's not the sort of thing you should go around whining about, it's just part of the deal.
The original poster moved from Metro NYC to the Midwest US. He's saving enough money on housing to pay for a business-class connection, many times over.
Few small businesses spring for the cost of an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for their connections. Even if you do, normally you'll just be able to get back the cost of the connection for the period when it wasn't working. Getting a service vendor to pay for your lost time is a pretty unusual agreement. Normally this kind of protection is obtained via an insurance policy -- think of it like the cancellation insurance that a concert promoter buys. As you might imagine, buying a policy to protect against comm outages and other things usually viewed as force majeure situations (i.e. 'acts of God') is not cheap.
Moreover, in most places business customers subsidize home customers. So if you really want your home account to be treated like a business, plan to pay 2-4 times as much for the same service, with no guarantees.
At least that's been my experience in several different locations with a variety of providers over 22 years in business.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Hold on a second and let me explain...
From what I know, there is a LAW requiring you to have A phone line active in order to call emergency services (911). If you have 2 lines, then they can take their time getting the 2nd running, but if the first line is gone,they have to get it back up FAST. Although virtually everyone that has phone services pays to use it for other things (call friends,etc). I think it is actually possiable to get a phone line for next to nothing (like in cents) or even actually for nothing that *only* works for 911.
So anyway, why not get a ISDN line? True its not as "fast" as dsl/cable etc but it *is* a phone line. You can make voice calls (and a lot of other dandy things) over a ISDN line. To cut to the chase, if you have that as your *only* line (no "normal' phone lines) then they would be required to keep the line going. This would be a 7 days a week, not "bussiness" hours, for this could get into deep legal problems with liability (life endangerment) and whatnot. Could be a quite interesting situation ^_^.
They get more done. Not always intentionally.
I know im talking out of my ass here, but why dont you get two separate broadband services? at 50-60$ each, it wont be to hard to pay and its very hard to have both broadband adapters down.
Supposedly Cable goes through a completely different circuit than ADSL, so you have a lot more connection stability.
Just my 0.02 pesos
Me fail english? That's Unpossible!
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
I've been telecommuting (mainly) for over 15 years now (even before the Net was widely available)and have found that you really need some redundancy for both your phone and internet connection.
It's pretty easy to get a couple of flat-rate internet accounts which will generally protect you from all but the worst disasters.
As for phone lines -- I have three lines coming into my house (voice, fax, modem) which gives me a little redundancy but, unfortunately, it seems that when one line goes out, so do the other two.
For this reason I also have a cellphone and cellular data modem on the shelf for "worst case" situations.
Of course you also need a spare PC, a good UPS and a backup generator if you really want 100% up-time (yes I have all of the above).
As a result of these measures, I've never lost more than an hour or two due to ISP or telco foul-ups.
The price of this redundancy is nothing when you compare it to the loss of a day's work.
First, I would have to say that your a bit of an unrealistic whiner. Why do you think that business shell out $800 a month for a T-1 rather than a $35 a month DSL line? SLA's, thats why.
But, I can relate.
If you are really worried about not having a connection, you reallly have two options.
1. pay for service, buy a business level circut that gives you a SLA.
2. pay for two diffrent providers. ie, cable and DSL or dish.
www.bleepyou.com
I have been consulting/telecommuting for 6+ years. I have redundant computers, UPS backups and most importantly, a Cable AND a DSL broadband connection. I use a Nexland ISB Pro800turbo DUAL WAN port router. I have yet to have BOTH DSL and cable down at the same time!
You get what you pay for. You want compensation pay for a business line. You want real internet service don't pay for AOL. You want....NEXT!
"As a single telecommuter, you have no clout and most local service has no alternate carrier so they know you cannot leave."
Wireless in the case of voice[1]. Wireless,Cable,Satellite in the case of data.
I left my local carrior for wireless. Haven't regretted it yet.
[1]Voip for the novelty of it.
Gas generator.
"Don't base your income on a residential service, you cheap fuck."
Well that attitude and response certainly explains a lot on the site below.
http://www.verizonpathetic.com/
In my experience it's rarely the local loop (i.e., phone company) at fault when a connection drops - it's almost always your ISP "doing maintenance" or just having a bad day.
So don't blame the phone company - call your ISP and get credit for the day, or the month if it happens often enough. But that won't compensate you for lost connectivity = work time. Use FedEx or get a second link (cable modem) complete with second NIC, connection reconfiguration scripts, whatever it takes. As a telecommuter, it's your responsibility to stay available and in touch, not your phone company, ISP, cable supplier, whoever. They'll never pay your lost wages or any other damages above line cost.
Now, when IPv6 comes along things might change - you might be able to get a Business Grade QoS commitment from your ISP - for a high Business Class price, of course.
>"A VPN connection will use LOTS more bandwidth than a regular residentail web surfer."
"It's not disinformation, it's about the availablilty of music and movies online that has changed what used to be the greatest consumers of bandwidth."
It's disinformation if it creates an impression that either was or is presently not true.
By your admission the landscape is changing, even for you. Also as the other poster pointed out to you the majority of VPN users, past and present don't use it the same way you do. Your more the exception than the rule, and in the larger picture the statement that "VPN users use LOTS more bandwith" might hold for a specific example but not for the aggregate whole.
BTW there's no technical infrastructure difference between "business" and "residential" class. Just premission and economic.
"* Don't be cheap. If Quality of Service (QOS) is important, spend the extra $50 to get business-class phone service. If your company won't reimburse, suck up and pay it yourself. Think of it as the cost of having a bigscreen TV, the ultimate chair and loud music playing 'in your cubicle.'
"
If I remember correctly. Any work-related cost you incur that your not reimbursed for, can be deducted from your taxes.
LEt's take the "average" IT position that would justify telecommuting. We're talking a $60k+ a year employee. After adding in payroll taxes, benefits, marginal costs of office space and equipment, etc., this employee costs the company approximately $90-$100k/year. We're talking over $8000/month.
In all honestly, most employers shouldn't freak that telecommuting costs $500/month. However, it IS reasonable to have the telecommuter's salary be less IF (and this is a BIG if) the costs of the connection is greater than the overhead of them being at the office.
If your employer really feels that $100-$300/mo for a business class DSL or $500 for a fractional T1 is too much money, you might want to crunch the numbers with them.
Alex
Um. Maybe I'm missing something. But the guy mentions moving to a "Midwestern city". Then he mentions Blacksburg VA. Am I the only one who thinks something is wrong with the picture there? Since when is Virginia part of the Midwest?
"As far as you employer is concerned, as nice as they may be about it, each is an unexpected day when you disrupted plans by being unavailable and/or unproductive."
Telecommuter: Um, boss.
Boss:Yea?
Telecommuter: I'm sorry to disrupt todays plans, but I can't work today.
Boss: And why not?
Telecommuter:Well I have this problem.
Boss:Which is?
Telecommuter:Well the house burned down. I hope you'll be understanding.
Boss:[thinking] Yeh, I'll be understanding alright. Oh ok well I understand see if you can come in.
The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to /. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?
For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.
Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.
It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that .99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for) but lets step back, take a deep breath, and ask if that is really a solution most folks are gonna gave a damn about? Would the average, or even many exceptional long-distance telecommuters require that speed and guarenteed uptime? Aren't there a lot of much more cost effective solution for most folks needs?
I dunno know about your needs but between dial-up, DSL or Broadband, and a backup cellphone connection I think most everyone could rough it out and keep productive while their primary service is out, all a lot cheaper then your solution.
IMHO
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If you want your shit to work all the time guaranteed, you need redundancy.
Start with a guaranteed uptime business class service from the phone company. Add a cable provider, and keep a dialup service too in case all of the above pukes.
If I had a business that absolutely required Internet connection and e-mail, I'd also take a hard look at the satellite providers and wireless cell phone modem as well. Floods, tornadoes and snow storms happen, you want to spread your risk as much as possible. If all phones are down, cable may still be up. If all wires period are down, cell phone may still be up. Etc.
If it isn't that important, enjoy your day off.
If you don't care about incoming connections, total speed, or keeping connections open, you can just switch IP addresses as needed. Otherwise, you have to have the same IP address on both interfaces, which requires your ISPs to cooperate, which won't happen unless you're paying for a "real" connection. (And if everybody did it, the global routing table would be intolerably huge, because the current routing strategy scales poorly.) Google for BGP as a start.
If your net connection is that critical, get more than one.
xDSL and a cable modem, with dial-up as a last resort, will give you redundent connections for far less than a frame-relay or T1 connection. With some creativity and free software (Linux or *BSD), or a couple of low-end routers, you could even set them up to fail over seamlessly.
Regarding the issues you raised. Get used to them. The unexpected will occur. Everything from your connectivity issues to their connectivity issues to VPN issues on both sides will occur. You name it it'll probably happen. Always have work you can perform without being connected to the office. This is a MUST.
I found my boss much more at ease when he knew that I always had a pile of things I could use the day to catch up on.
dijit-at-half-truth.com
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I don't use any of the apple system 9 stuff. To run it you have to have the whole system installed and I already have all the apps I need from the unix or OS X side.
One of the coolest things I've found has been fink. It's a port of debian's package management system. It's generally pretty bleeding edge, and I've used it to cleanly and easily build many packages, like the latest XFree86, xemacs, ethereal, mysql, etc...
I've been able to use apples mail client to cleanly manage multiple accounts, and assign all the standard rules, filters, etc.. and I use iTunes to listen to my music. I've also messed around with Office and haven't had any real issues with it ( other then the whole microsoft issue ). The majority of my development however is done with X apps and in shells.
The pretty finish is just a little added style to whats been a really stable system for me. :)
Hope this helps!
Jim
WeFunk
With Pacific Bell (and probably most other providers), they will divvy up the days of downtime you had, then subtract the pro-rated amount off your bill. You won't get a free month with these guys, trust me. You don't get a red cent for the hours you waste on the phone with tech support, and you also don't get anything for waiting hours and hours for a technician to arrive. That's not even getting into the lost productivity...
I'm glad to see that one of you "big city" people that have taken high speed connections for granted for so long, is getting shafted by the phone company! Welcome to BFE (bum fuck egypt) also known as Western Kansas. When we got a new phone line to use for internet, our connection speed dropped from 49333bps to 26400bps. When I called the phone company, I was told that we were just s.o.l because we lived so far out in God's country that it would be a few years yet before they updated all the phone lines to handle the faster connection. With no cable internet service in town and wireless so damn expensive, the general public doesn't have much choice on the ass raping the phone company gives us everyday.
So in response to you "poor baby I couldn't whack off at work for two days because my phone line sucks....", I say FUCK YOU, get over it and move back to the city you yuppy scum!
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Using a residential service to perform business functions is illogical. ISPs specifically sell business-class services for a reason. I currently work for a residential broadband isp (who offers business services as well). I'd hazard to say 25% of the callers say "You don't understand, I CAN'T be down for a whole day, I'm running BUSINESS here, a BUSINESS! (Always the emphasis on the word "business"), I'm losing x amount of money!" Each and every time, our response is "We do offer a business-class service for as low as $200 a month..." to which their response is always "I can't afford $200 a month!!!" Seriously, a residential service has no reliability, the one I happen to work for doesn't have any garauntees on uptime, reliability, stability, speed, and absolutely no garauntees on when we'll be able to repair service if it goes down. You get it fixed when we're able to fix it. As opposed to the business class service, that has a 99.9% uptime garauntee, 24/7 on-site technical support (Within 4 hours of reported problem), and 50% rated line speed garauntee (If you sign up for the 512kbps package, garaunteed to get at least 256kbps) I think the real kicker is, these same people that complain about how their business is affected, is never willing to troubleshoot or pay for additional assistance (example: Pay to have a technician visit, diagnose, and repair a problem). They want garaunteed uptime, T1 speeds, same-day technician calls, 24/7 technical support, reimbursement for lost wages, and they expect to get all that for $50 a month. If anyone knows about a $50 a month garauntee wage reimbursement system, sign me up. Some type of insurance company "Can't do your job? We'll pay you your full wages for only $50 a month!" If your business, job, etc. doesn't pay you enough to telecommute using a business-class service, maybe you should just get out of telecommuting. Every one of these people who calls in about running a business or working from home makes it sound like they're running a multi-million dollar international corporation from their basement. If you can only afford $50 a month for business expenses, maybe you should go over your business plan. You get precisely what you pay for, if you pay for a residential service, you get it. Along with all the down-time, instability, congestion, ping spikes, and slow technical support response time that comes with it. If you want to run a business, or work from home, you need a business service. It's like trying to do the indy 500 in a yugo and wanting to sue the company because the engine's just not keeping up with the other cars. "I pay $400 a month for rent! What do you mean I can't run a multi-national corporation out of my apartment? And by the way, I want reimbursement for the loss of business because the elevator was broken last week and my R&D team couldn't deliver the prototype to me." Pfft! Jekler
That would be Qwest, as advertised on their website. They spread across several other states as well.
The phone company is right. You're not using your phone line as a residential line. You ACTUALLY do business on your phone line, I would say that constitutes you purchasing a business line.
Amazing for a town where indoor plumbing is still considered a luxury.
Yes, that does help. Now my biggest problem is giving up the point-stick for a mouse pad. My thumbs aren't very precise... ;-)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I have cable. As do most of my friends. Now and then one of us goes down. One of them was down for like 4ish days and couldnt get a service guy out there for like 11 days and broke down and got a dial up service for a month (think he used some free aol hours, guess they are good for something).
Anyways we pay 50ish a month get our down time and deal with it. Only calling to bitch when its down. Now that excite@home is gone reliablity has gottne better.
But if you NEED the connectivty pay for it and write it off on taxes.
I have been telecommuting since September, 1999. I've got business phone and data lines. Last year somebody put a leaking airconditioner right over the PBX at Verizon's CO and there was no service in my exchange for a day. IMHO, getting satisfaction from the phone company is an after the fact thing.
That's what I do, anyway. Usually work is understanding and I get to goof off. Since they run Microsoft and I don't they have TONS more downtime than I do out in the sticks with my 26K modem connection so they don't begrudge me a little downtime.
-Greg
A lot of your material seemed responding to a laundry list of fallback suggestions I made, and in your case I understand why my way will never work for you. However, the poster said they moved to a midwestern CITY. That means they probably have a few options you don't. That also means they probably don't have to contend with a dozen miles of lightning-prone wiring and that increased risk of regular long outages.
What I recommended fits the small-city billing more. If one doesn't want to deplete one's income by 2 to 4 kilobucks a year (a chintzy move, I tell myself, since it's easier to raise my rate a buck or two to cover the difference) and one has somewhere near enough the desired level of connectivity going for them, these were offered up as ideas for that freak day of downtime. I don't expect another cut cable, my speeds are acceptable, and the work I do is 80% about day-to-day productivity improvements due to speed and being connected AT ANY SPEED and 20% about the few non-deadline-critical hours of high bandwidth in a month when I'm doing fat transfers or hammering something remote pretty hard.
Here's my logic for my situation: if cable fails: ISP might work. If ISP via dialup fails or won't provide the bandwidth, I have a short list of highspeed connection points. Given the cause of death on the above two, I sort out equally-dead solutions and pick the best way to get online. Unlike a huge corporate office, I can bring a hot offsite backup online at no added cost by getting in the car and driving my laptop out of the problem zone. Since I have a local downtown with 3 good options just five minutes away and an adjacent town with internet cafe 30 minutes away, my max downtime is 30 minutes. That's acceptable to the people I work for, so I'm fine with what I spend.
A last thought... when you go to your 4-H show and someone needs you to VPN in... are you sure you wouldn't be wiser to already know where the nearest t-1 or similar hotspot is? A laptop, a trailer and a cellphone seemed tantamount to a joke to you a few lines earlier. For that matter, what do you do when lightning strikes twice?
Man, I know this is going to sound like I'm picking a fight, but I don't mean to. I just feel that sometimes, as silly as it sounds, there are solutions around that will do for that improbable situation. And that's what incident response planning is all about... thinking ahead to minimize/mitigate the downtime's effect even if god deals you a 1-2 punch at an inopportune time.
Keep Cool. Don't Freeze -- Heilman's Mayonaise
Well my dad was looking into just this, he has an unlimited local calling plan with a great number of pop's in his local dialing area. While the connection is shitty (19.2kbps) it does work and costs him no additional ammount (he already has a dialup account and the cell plan).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hi!
Thanks for your response. I think perhaps I may have confused you with my comments about working while I'm at a horse show.
The T1 circuit: there isn't a plan B. I'm pretty plugged-in to the local technology scene (I've been active in economic development organizations, etc.) and I'm certain that there isn't a public Internet presence (cafe, etc.) for at least 40 miles. We don't have any risk of a direct hit by lightning--we're adjacent to a high-tension line, so any lightning is going to hit the tower in the park, not us. I see your point: we could smoke a Smart Card, replace it, and see the new one smoked a few minutes later. We don't see a one-to-one correlation between electrical storms and smoking Smart Cards--we usually don't see a problem. So I view the possibility of smoking two cards within a few hours as a relatively low risk.
Horse shows: I'd never even think about trying to VPN into a client from a horse show. If I'm working that remotely, I'm doing development work. If I need to talk to a client, I'll call to ask a question. And if there's an opportunity, I'll mention that I'm at a horse show--in effect, saying "don't you wish you had my job?" What I'm doing is marketing the "Murdoch from the woods" image--it works with the clientele.
Your idea of having pre-identified fallback points is a good one. I'm not the only geek out here in the woods--a pal a few miles away develops imaging software (http://www.badertech.com). We've talked off and on about doing different stuff to make ourselves more secure--swapping tapes (which we do now and again), emergency recovery, etc. But all we've really done is talk--I'm seeing him later today for coffee, and it might be a good idea to bring it up. Thanks!
OK, check out Zebra (www.zebra.org). Use the OSPF routing protocol. It is simple, stable (even though it says alpha, I have been using it from the beginning and it is great!) and will route either by balancing connections or setting a preferred route to one provider. As an added bonus, it acts just like a Cisco router!