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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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's perfectly acceptable in today's world, whether it is with you personally or not. That's the exact guarantee most business providers will give you -- 24 business hours, even if a truck roll is required.
This has nothing to do with "Evil Cable / Teleco". This is because the world in general has not transitioned over completely to the idea that business is a 7-day-a-week thing anymore, and not just "open Mon through Fri". You're going to have to convince the world in general to accept this before anything can be done in this regard... because 90% of the time Business means Monday-through-Friday. That's why we still call them the Business Days...
-- Primis.
What do you think the cost of maintaining an 8x8 office cubicle is, relative to the cost of a business class DSL line for that employee in his/her home instead.
Never mind the fact that $100 a month(or less) is peanuts to pay in order to pick up an employee that you want but is unwilling/unable to work where your corporate office is.
In many areas, people pay several dollars extra per day in tolls to avoid traffic jams and be able to drive to work faster. Some employers pay for the car, gas and tolls to get the worker there each day. What's the difference?
Stuart Kahler
- 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.
Most outages are 1 day or less (it is really annoying when you people call after the service is down for 10 mins complaining -- if it is down more than 12 hours, call otherwise, wait, it isn't that important, really.)
I've learned 1 thing from having Cox Cable internet service out here in Vegas. And that is, the second the modem goes down, call Cox. The reason being that half of the times my modem has gone down, it has been a fault with my modem or the line to my house or the connection at my street or any other number of things that seem to be relegated to me only. No way am I going to waste basically an entire work day just on the hope that it is a system-wide problem and not just me. I would rather call up and "bother" tech support to make sure I'm not the only one. I've actually run into 3 or 4 techs that gave me the same kind of attitude you gave in your post. Granted, I only pushed hard enough to get 1 of them fired, but that kind of mentality, particularly from people that are supposed to be there to help, is just inexcusable. If people calling up tech support when things aren't working is "really annoying" to you, then perhaps you should look for a different line of work.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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.
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.
I have to agree. I'm living in Vancouver, BC, and my dad is living in Toronto, Ontario. Let me try to be politic by saying that he is somewhat "technically challenged". When he first signed up for Internet connectivity, he called one of the baby bells and they proceded to do a good job of screwing up and causing a bunch of stress... for EVERYONE involved! (Believe me, there's a REASON why I moved halfway across the country, and I feel for the tech support guy)
All in all, dad was pretty turned off of this whole Internet thing because it wasn't working right, and I was getting a little frustrated being his tech support from across the country.
I proceded to make some calls and do some research, and came across a couple of small "mom and pop" type shops. I found one that was the consumate "local store" ISP. I explained the fact that my dad was "high maintenance" and "technically challenged", and they laughed and said "no problem". I got a good feeling from them, both socially and technically, and dad went ahead and switched over. The new ISP actually handled the switch-over for him. Things went well, and dad's on-line with the best of them.
Now when he's got a technical question or problem he calls them and they know him by name, seem to go out of their way to help him out, and everyone is happy. Dad's probably one of their best marketting tools, and he even helped them buy their last house (he's a real estate broker).
It's pretty refreshing to think that not all technology delivered to the masses has to be provided by some large corporate entity that treats you like crap, and that the "little guy" still has a place. If anything, I think there's a bigger need for the "little guy" now more than ever.
$0.02 (CDN)
Permit me to elaborate: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms. A T1 circuit terminates at a "Smart Card" in a box at the demarc point in your building. If your circuit goes down because of a power surge in the phone line, its the Smart Card that gets clobbered.
One night the Smart Card got clobbered. The alarms went off (we have a testing program that keeps track of our Internet connection) and I called for help. The data circuit techs are in Bethlehem--about 25 miles away--and they couldn't get to me till early the next morning. It was a problem. The best solution to the problem was for the techs to walk me through a little bit of debugging and leave me with a Smart Card. If that circuit goes down now, I'm back up within a minute or two. The techs still have to come from Bethlehem--but they now know that it is not a rush, and they can expect coffee and doughnuts when they arrive.
Am I getting the service I'm paying for? I think I am. As I wrote in my earlier reply, there are different aspects to life in rural America. Bitching at the techs when they appear just isn't done--they've come a long way, they have a lot of people to look after, and they have implemented a solution with me that guarantees less than 4 minutes of downtime per year. (We've been up continuously since August 8, BTW.) I'm paying for five 9s of reliability, and I'm getting it--I'm just getting it in a slightly different way than I would if I lived on Long Island. It's not polite to demand "what I paid for"--it's a lot smarter, and a lot more effective, to remember that the one tech that usually comes likes his coffee black, and his brother has Quarter Horses. And to repeat my offer that if his brother ever wants to ride the trails in the state park he can park his rig here and hack down the road.
Seem crazy? There's method to this madness...
A long time ago a friend and sometime colleague hired me as a consultant for a project at a big insurance company on Wall Street. Charlie (who is active on SlashDot) made sure that everybody knew that I lived near the Appalachian Trail--to hear Charlie tell it, we only wore clothes when we dressed up to go to town. Charlie and his co-workers lived their days amidst an endless sea of pea green 8' by 8' cubicles--hoping for the day when they'd get promoted one grade and move to a pea green 8' by 10' cubicle with arms on the chairs. The image of the wild man consultant living in the woods--chop a little wood, write a little code--really resonated with those people. It is an image that I have learned to cultivate--new clients learn early on that I'm a 4-H leader, and I'm not the slightest bit shy about blocking off days in the summer to take a trailer load of kids to a horse show. And if I do work there (I put up a canopy and work on my notebook, plugged into the AC adapter in the truck) I often as not will call the client on the cell phone. It makes a statement to the client that absolutely guarantees that I stand out in their minds.