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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?
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
I work for a provider of broadband services. DSL services are the bottom of the barrel. The technology is simply built on top of old technology. There is nothing you can do to prevent downtimes. No provider gaurantees 5 nines 99.999 or anything close for Residential DSL. The increased costs of Business DSL is to cover circuit monitoring and faster response times, many times AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RESIDENTIAL DSL SUBSCRIBERS, so the business class can be brought online again.
Bottom line - if you are telecommuting, it is a business class - pay for it, and THEN you will get special treatment.
No matter what, you will ALWAYS have downtime... that is the nature of the Internet. So, if connectivity is so important, bite the bullet and order cable as a second backup provider, or break out the old dialup modem.
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.
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 hard-lines are broken, pull out your cell-phone, laptop, adapters...and dial away.
They is always a way around, you just have to antecipate it.
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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]
No SLA, business or residential, is ever going to pay for lost wages. You'll probably get a pro-rated service credit or if you bitch enough, a month of free service. Just rememnber to write down the time of every outage and the trouble ticket number when you call tech support. My friend got a few months of free DSL that way when his GTE DSL went down almost every night when everybody got online. They totally oversold their service and eventually they upgraded.
Business service isn't any better. If the phones or T1 at the office go down (thankfully not often) no way they'll pay for lost business or lost wages. Service credit is all you'll get. If you're that worried, give yourself an out in your contract so you can be released from the long-term contract and cancel them for shitty service.
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
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
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
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
With respect, I disagree. I am spending that kind of money, for that kind of bandwidth. For a couple of reasons:
I'm an independent consultant. I use VPN to connect to clients, and I use VPN to let associates connect to me. I choose to live in a rural area along the Appalachian Trail--but I work for clients in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, and Allentown. I'm not a telecommuter per se--but I face the same challenge: being taken seriously.
If they don't take you seriously, you're toast:
The original poster has decided to leave the big city and move to the Midwest. But he's still working for the company office in Manhattan. He has just been through the telecommuter's worst nightmare: he couldn't get stuff done because he couldn't connect. He fulfilled the predictions of the nay-sayers at work: he wasn't able to get something done. That has hurt his standing with his peers and with his management--it has hurt his credibility.
Going after the local phone company for compensation is a waste of time. What he has to do is ensure it never happens again--which means that he has to identify a super-reliable technology, and assume personal responsibility for the problem. In management buzz-speak, he has to own the problem. Bitching about the lousy phone company is not "owning the problem"--doing something about it is. Spending $250 per month for a 256k circuit means taking ownership of the problem--if he has five 9s of reliability (which equates to 4 minutes of downtime per year) there's a pretty good likelihood that he's going to have better reliability than the office in Manhattan. When he has better uptime than they do, he looks a lot more serious, a lot more credible, than somebody frantically driving halfway to Chicago to find a Kinko's where he can use a web browser. (Tip from us hicks: Kinko's are not everywhere. And if you need a web browser, its a lot easier to go to a public library. They're all wired.)
There is another dimension to this:
He's telecommuting to an office in New York. Office workers in New York look down their noses at anybody else--somebody who announces that he's leaving the NY Metro area for Indiana is beneath contempt. He is not to be taken seriously. But--he definitely moves to the "did you hear about Bob?" list when he announces that he has a T1 circuit. (That's its only fractional is immaterial: in fact, he's got a full-bore T1 to the CO. But Bob doesn't need to share all the details.) And when Bob demonstrates better uptime than the office LAN, and hosts a presentation on his own web server, and then mentions that he's paying $400 per month for his mortgage payment...a lot of people might just wish that they were Bob.
You can live and work in rural America. There are savings (my house costs less, my insurance costs less), there are lifestyle benefits (I'm a 4-H leader, and we have 4 horses), but there are costs too (the T1 circuit, the money we spend on gas to go anyplace). There are downsides to the lifestyle (it's a long way to a restaurant that doesn't have laminated menus or a drive-thru). But to be successful out here, over the long term, you absolutely must demonstrate consistency and reliability.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, said that "you're only as good as your tools." He was talking about electrical equipment--but its just as true with computer equipment. If you're doing email from home at night and you live in a commuter suburb--hey, get a DSL line. If you're connecting to the corporate network full-time from an office in your home, don't bet your career on that DSL circuit. And if you're going completely remote--moving 800 miles away from the office like the original poster has done--you have to provide absolute reliability. You need every single one of those five 9s.
And don't forget...
If you have rock-solid bandwidth, you can easily implement VOIP. Which, for our friend from Indiana, makes him a technology leader....
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