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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?
Perfectly acceptable is in the eye of the beholder. I spent 5 years working at a top NSP, and 10 minutes of unplanned downtime at 2 AM sunday morning was unacceptable to our customers. In other instances of downtime, I've waited more than 2 days in the middle of the week to get my phone AND dsl back up when they went down together. Down monday, and a person will be dispatched, "by thursday", and sure enough, not until thursday morning do I get a tech -- who discovered without even coming to my address that it was just a problematic port in a switch 400 miles away and fixes it remotely.
Anyhow, it might be your opinion that 24 business hours is 'standard' -- but it isn't for a business service provided by a real provider. If I had a T1 and it was down, an ISP would be testing the line inside of minutes, and SWBell advertises business DSL as an alternative to 'expensive leased lines'. In other words, they want to sell you a premium service (and the beefy DSL I was subscribing to was $180/mo, pretty hefty for typical broadband), but provide you entry-level service. Furthermore, they're selling this to retail business and other 7-day-a-week operations. The tech who installed mine had a retail store in a nearby shopping center as his next call -- if their DSL was down on all weekend, I wonder how it would affect them?
You've been duped into thinking that the poor service provided by a telco monopoly is normal. Just because it's typical telco crap doesn't mean it isn't crap.