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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?
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.
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.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
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.
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.
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.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you