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?

Comments

They don't compensate for downtime?!

[Anonynnous Coward]

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.

Re:They don't compensate for downtime?!

[garcia]

ok, $50.00/mo typical cost for cable service.

$50/30days = 1.67/day.

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.)

So for $1.67/day I don't consider that exactly what we are talking about here, but I may be wrong. Like I have said before. People are looking for lost wages, etc. They are not looking for 1.67/day.

Maybe not as simple as it seems.

[j-turkey]

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

Re:Local Library

[dsb3]

That's why you bring your own laptop.

The library may not be the best choice (they may not have open jacks for your own computer), but an internet cafe should provide that, as will the 'laptop lanes' in your local airport.

Re:You have a [residential] contract.

[Anonymous Freak]

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...

Re:Your Business should handle this

[YoJ]

It is not the company's responsibility to pay for this. I think it is entirely appropriate that you pay for your own business line to telecommute. That's a decision you have to make. Businesses do not buy you a car to be able to get to work every day; why should they buy you a business line to telecommute? It would be nice if businesses helped provide you with internet connectivity, but I wouldn't be upset if they did not.

Business class service? Bend over...

[aquarian]

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!

My experience as a telecommuter for 2.5 years

[rjamestaylor]

I started telecommuting with the birth of my first son in October 1999. Initially, I had a dial-up connection over which I ran Citrix ICA (for corporate email connectivity) and K95 (for telnet connectivity to our UNIX/Linux servers; I was a legacy application/web developer). That sucked, but worked. I worked from home for the first weeks after "the delivery" but eventually returned to going into the office 4 days per week until my DSL line was installed.

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.

Re:My experience as a telecommuter for 2.5 years

[pvera]

Your experience is similar to mine and my employees.

I am a microsoft dot whore, so all my web development is asp and SQL server. If I can get away with it I will run a development server from my home office and upload a daily update. If the project is too big or there are more than one programmer then I will host it at the office and use Terminal Services to manage the server.

And yes, people are working longer when we tell them to telecommute and use flex time. Some people work 10-12 hrs (with decent output) instead of the 5-6 hrs of productive work I dream of them getting while at the office.

I dunno about Oprah, but I got a Hauppauge card in my main home PC and I got used to watch Maury Povich while catching up the morning wave of emails. Then the rest of the day it was The Hitler Channel...oops, I mean The History Channel. If you have a quiet home office and a TV playing documentaries you can code for hours without even noticing.

Which is a bad thing.

Eventually I got sick of working at my home office for more than two days in a row. What I try to do now is go to the office 3 days a week. Depending on meetings I may not be at the office before 11:00 AM or after 3:00 PM. The way the projects are run it does not matter where we are as long as the work is done.

Now, one thing I learned in the last few months is that it is better to rotate around the house and not stay holed into the home office. I convinced the IT folks to assign me a laptop on top of the desktop I kept at the office (employees are usually allowed to sign for one computer).

I put a wireless card on the laptop and got a wireless access point. Now I can wake up at 7:00 AM, read the first wave of emails and then doze off until 10:00 AM, which is the time when most of the people will be up and ready to work. I can take the laptop to starbucks and connect to the wireless network in the nearby CompUSA (the idiots could not figure out WEP, so they left it off). That way I can keep an eye on email and instant messages.

If I want to take a nap in the afternoon I put the cordless phone and laptop by the bed, so I am always reachable.

Of course, people abuse the system. If project managers start to complain that they cannot reach you when they need you or that your work is lacking quality then you will lose these privileges pretty quickly.

Re:new 'business' class

[tkrotchko]

Sure, but their liability is capped and in every case, the liability of the provider of a T1 is at most the monthly cost of the T1.

So if you pay $1600/month, and it goes down for a week, they'll simply won't charge you for the month.

You're right in that the SLA means they're out fixing it within a short period of time, but they never guarantee when they'll fix it. In fact, most T1 TOS don't even have a guaranteed latency or ping time.

So, no, you don't really get what you pay for with a T1, but the telco has a monopoly on the local loop, so its not like you can shop around for the best loop provider.