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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"
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.
However, it isn't as though you can plop down VPN software on library computers and do your WORK from there. Same goes for internet cafe. Working in public places on computers that are not yours or your company's property is a BAD idea IMHO.
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 do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work? "
Simple, I read a good book or spend time with my friends. Seriously, this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school because it is too icy out or something.
It depends on what your work is, of course, but I would simply make sure that I can get work done even with a net outage. Mirror essential documents or code pieces locally, and you can get something done anyway. There is always documentation to write, proposals to tinker with or reading to catch up on. And if you need to talk to a colleague, there's always still the telephone...
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
Maybe as a perk of telecommuting, the company could pay for a business line, or negotiate a special deal if it has a bunch of folks telecommuitng. Then the support would really be there, at least I would hope so. (heh ... right)
Home businesses would be in a different class.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
You have a RESIDENTIAL line. They're not going to sue you/disconnect you/etc for using it for some business purposes, but there are no guarantees.
I'm sure they will gladly refund the % of your montly bill for your downtime, but other than that, don't expect anything.
Want to know why a business line is 120$ for a base line when a residential one is 25$? Service expectations and guarantees.
Your residential line is for your convenience. That's why it's cheap. You don't pay much, and you don't expect much.
A business line is expensive. You pay a lot, you expect a lot.
Heh, if slashdot was an auto/truck site:
"I use my mazda sport-truck to haul three tons of gravel 5 days a week. I don't want to buy a utility truck, it's too expensive, but mazda said my warranty didn't cover the drivetrain breakdown! What's wrong with them!"
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.
I had my line go out for two weeks... sprint did nothing... I finally called for what seemed to be the 20th time.. or was it 30th, and demanded to speak to the manager over and over and over. I finally go to an customer compaints office thats directly under the president of sprint. She put me on hold while she called the field technican supervisor, and when she got back on the line, she said that a tech should be at my house in twenty minutes.... then she said that she would call me back in twenty minutes. Sure enough, 15 minutes latter, a sprint tech showed up and started diagnosing the problem. I stood on my niehgboor's back deck and watched the sprint dude run for his life to try and fix it. In all honesty, it was funny as hell. The woman did have my account credited for the month. She said that is not a normal pratice for them to do, that they only do it if a line has been down an extreamly excessive period of time.
This is very similar to the problems I had back when everything was based on a mainframe and terminals. What do you do when THE computer is down? Here's some ideas that worked, then, and some others that I've found helpful, now.
So far as I know, Murphy's Law has not yet been repealed. Expect things to go wrong. Come up with contingencies. Do what you can. (And if you can't do anything, take a vacation and make the most of it!)
If you are not already telecommuting, and are thinking of starting, be sure to discuss these issues with your employer BEFORE YOU START!
The fact is that if you do use it for business and the phone company finds out they can cut you off or potentially block the service. I think on slashdot here there was a case where some ISP was cutting off its residential uses from using vpn. Most probably wont do that as they don't care. It is not worth their time to monitor what you are doing unless you start causing problems in their network. Then it is abuse.
Most decent ISP, like Earthlink/Mindspring would compensate you by refunding you the amount of time that you were down. So if you were down for 3 days they would deduct it from your next bill. Rather than you paying $50 one month you'd pay about $48 (I'm sure someone here will do the exact math). They would not compensate you for lost time at work.
Were you to get a business line then they would have to keep you up 24/7 else you could sue them for lost business income. I have seen this happen before and there is little you can do. However if you want to persue this read your Terms of Service and see if it mentions anything about this. It probably says 'your screwed if you....'
Only 'flamers' flame!
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.
Thats quite true.... I'm in a situation at work right now where were only paying the loop, no data fees. decent service. CLECs that try to do phones, and pick up 1/2 to 2/3 of the loop charge are just loosing money and they provide poor service.
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
-Turkey
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'm paying the extra for 'business' dsl, which, aside from having a static /29, is the same as residential rates -- when my DSL went down at 4:30pm on a Friday, I was told the soonest a technician could look into it was Monday. Huh? If my business depends on my connectivity, I can't wait that time. Business lines are just a way to soak the customers for extra money, they won't help your service.
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.
First off, I have local mirrors of the code I work on. Anything goes down, I can still work disconnected. 'Yall use version control, right? You can easily integrate a fork between your own work-for-a-day and everything else, right?
Additionally, my employer has a phone bank to allow folks to dial in in emergencies. It's long distance from here so I rarely use it, but if you *really* *really* need to get that expense report in the email or grab a copy of that code you were working on, it's darned nifty to have.
Second, as everyone else says -- if you want high reliability, get your company to pay for a business-class line.
You agreed to it when you signed up for your bandwidth. Are they violating that?
Now... also.
If you are telecommuting for real (you aren't working for yourself).. your employer should be paying for the bandwidth.
As for downtime.. if the downtime is so important, get multiple connections.
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.
It is very, very, very difficult to feel sympathy for anyone who gets to telecommute.
I have been telecommuting for over three years. Forget the advice you are getting here, most of it is wrong. Even with a T1 or better you are not going to get any type of lost time guarantee. The absolute best deal I have seen is some percentage of line cost returned after an extended (as defined by the contract) outage.
Every deal is unique and residential customers are so far down the line as to be without any hope(I have dealt with Bell Atlantic, Verizon, and Bell South). My favorite comment was from the Bell South rep who, when I could only connect to the office at 13k, told me that they only guarantee 9600 baud on a residential phone line and anything better was just lucky. (It relates back to fax machines of all things.)
While that was a residential line, a business less promises faster service, rarely anything else. If you are a large company, you get very fast service and little downtime because of a service level agreement(SLA) and the ability to backbone with other choices. As a single telecommuter, you have no clout and most local service has no alternate carrier so they know you cannot leave. Feel free to write to the public utilities commission or whatever your state supports. They will tell you that under the connection agreement, there is nothing they can do.
Yes - it sucks. No - it's not fair. As the attorney for Verizon told me - they don't care. Tough to argue when they are willing to admit they could care less about what you like or don't. You could always try a two way satellite link. But that will cost you about $80/month to use as a backup and VPN is a real issue.
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.
- 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.
1. Cable Modem
2. ISDN to a different ISP
3. Analog Dialup to Company Network
4. GPRS or GSM dialup
Obviously, my company pays for all of them. The point is: if Internet access is important, have at least one backup, if not more.
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
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.
I work tech support for a cable modem provider from my home.
When the option to telecommute became available, Although I had a residential cable modem in my home, my employer provided a seperate "business" cable modem (same stuff, different account), as well as a business phone line,a workstation, a desk and chair.
Although uptime is not a regular issue, when I do need to call in for loss of connectivity, the business folks are harder to get ahold of than the residential folks. This is simply because the residential service has Hundreds of TSR's while the business folks end up having me leave a message and call me back. The business tech support people at least know wht a VPN is and can resolve issues quickly.
The main reason for the business account (in my lower level employee understanding)is the VPN connection which is against the AUP of the residential service. A VPN connection will use LOTS more bandwidth than a regular residentail web surfer.
with new file sharing apps and people who constantly share hundreds of files over thier residential connection, VPN bandwidth usage is not the big issue it used to be. Although lots of people run VPN over their residential line, larger usage comes from folks who keep a connection open to a file sharing network or run servers or host websites.
All in all, if I can't connect from home, I drive 20 minutes and work from the office but have only had to do this once in 2 years.
I may be partial, but, get a cable modem if you can, and use the phone line as a backup.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Residential phone lines, and therefore dsl, isdn, and whatever other services they offer, are for RESIDENTIAL use. That typically means for home entertainment purposes and not as a high availability critical business resource. This means occasionally it might go down, or bandwidth might be limited. This means they might restrict your monthly bandwidth consumption, or restrict your use of servers. If you rely on this for your business needs, then you need to pay for guaranteed uptime or at the very least get yourself an alternative internet connection. If its REALLY that important, then thats just the sacrifice you have to make.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
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]
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
Simple and straight foward. But it is easier to ask slashdot and have others do your thinking for you ?? My sdsl thru covad is considered business critical, costs 139.00 for 384/384 but is up or I get payed(the company that is).
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
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!
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
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.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Not an uptime guaruntee per se but my SLA with uunet provides for a full month's refund for as little as 15 minutes of unscheduled downtime. Seems like quite a motivating factor. We also pay >$1200 for service each month, so we're not talking low-revenue residential here.
For those like me who have only one broadband option and need a definite backup plan, think about Starband or even uunet's VSAT service as a backup. Sure latency might be fun but it will give you access when nothing else will.
Your most reliable bet is probably to get a second means of access; I mean, you have several choices: dial-up, wireless, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc. And you can always pick up your laptop and head to your local Internet cafe.
Besides, you can have downtime at work, too, when you can't work. Like when the coffee machine is malfunctioning.
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
Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare
Wow. I'd like to know where in Blacksburg you live, Cliff. I know that we got royally screwed over by Adelphia's plans to move to two-way cable, ending up being out of service for over a week in two separate incidences. This put me at least a week behind in some of my work, and got some of my clients quite irate with me.
But when I called up Adelphia to tel lthem of my situation, the following quote "Our service is intended for personal use only, and is not guaranteed for any "profit-making ventures"". Now the fact that I actually worked for Adelphia for a while so I had the inner hand in who to talk to didn't make a difference here...this was their policy and we were screwed.
As far as Blacksburg goes, if you have in-apartment ethernet, you're golden. Things otherwise have gotten better...but it has defintely had its rough spots.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
How about 4 miles outside of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, adjacent to a state park? We don't live in a city--we're in a Class III township in eastern Pennsylvania. The northern boundary of the township is the Appalachian Trail.
Few small businesses spring for the cost of an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for their connections. Even if you do, normally you'll just be able to get back the cost of the connection for the period when it wasn't working. Getting a service vendor to pay for your lost time is a pretty unusual agreement. Normally this kind of protection is obtained via an insurance policy -- think of it like the cancellation insurance that a concert promoter buys. As you might imagine, buying a policy to protect against comm outages and other things usually viewed as force majeure situations (i.e. 'acts of God') is not cheap.
Moreover, in most places business customers subsidize home customers. So if you really want your home account to be treated like a business, plan to pay 2-4 times as much for the same service, with no guarantees.
At least that's been my experience in several different locations with a variety of providers over 22 years in business.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I've been telecommuting (mainly) for over 15 years now (even before the Net was widely available)and have found that you really need some redundancy for both your phone and internet connection.
It's pretty easy to get a couple of flat-rate internet accounts which will generally protect you from all but the worst disasters.
As for phone lines -- I have three lines coming into my house (voice, fax, modem) which gives me a little redundancy but, unfortunately, it seems that when one line goes out, so do the other two.
For this reason I also have a cellphone and cellular data modem on the shelf for "worst case" situations.
Of course you also need a spare PC, a good UPS and a backup generator if you really want 100% up-time (yes I have all of the above).
As a result of these measures, I've never lost more than an hour or two due to ISP or telco foul-ups.
The price of this redundancy is nothing when you compare it to the loss of a day's work.
In my experience it's rarely the local loop (i.e., phone company) at fault when a connection drops - it's almost always your ISP "doing maintenance" or just having a bad day.
So don't blame the phone company - call your ISP and get credit for the day, or the month if it happens often enough. But that won't compensate you for lost connectivity = work time. Use FedEx or get a second link (cable modem) complete with second NIC, connection reconfiguration scripts, whatever it takes. As a telecommuter, it's your responsibility to stay available and in touch, not your phone company, ISP, cable supplier, whoever. They'll never pay your lost wages or any other damages above line cost.
Now, when IPv6 comes along things might change - you might be able to get a Business Grade QoS commitment from your ISP - for a high Business Class price, of course.
LEt's take the "average" IT position that would justify telecommuting. We're talking a $60k+ a year employee. After adding in payroll taxes, benefits, marginal costs of office space and equipment, etc., this employee costs the company approximately $90-$100k/year. We're talking over $8000/month.
In all honestly, most employers shouldn't freak that telecommuting costs $500/month. However, it IS reasonable to have the telecommuter's salary be less IF (and this is a BIG if) the costs of the connection is greater than the overhead of them being at the office.
If your employer really feels that $100-$300/mo for a business class DSL or $500 for a fractional T1 is too much money, you might want to crunch the numbers with them.
Alex
If memory serves, There is an FCC reg requiring a T1 line to be up 90% of the time.
The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to /. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?
For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.
Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.
It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that .99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for) but lets step back, take a deep breath, and ask if that is really a solution most folks are gonna gave a damn about? Would the average, or even many exceptional long-distance telecommuters require that speed and guarenteed uptime? Aren't there a lot of much more cost effective solution for most folks needs?
I dunno know about your needs but between dial-up, DSL or Broadband, and a backup cellphone connection I think most everyone could rough it out and keep productive while their primary service is out, all a lot cheaper then your solution.
IMHO
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.
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
Well not only that, but I was talking with a friend about this yesterday and in some states if he is working in a home office in another state, i.e. teh company is in NY wna dhe is in VA, the company he works for may have to be incorporated in the state that he is living/working in. He may also have to have special permits to work in a home office depending on county/province and city/town ordinaces. Most of the time we overlook these as noone really knows about these requirements or cares. He should think twice as this could get him and the company he works for into trouble.
Only 'flamers' flame!
true, you can be down that much if there is something major, but telco's dont take the chance, and they repair lines nearly as fast as they can... give or take two to four hours. I know that many of my local co's start firing people if a loop alarm is on for more then six hours. Managed vs. Unmanaged response time is just about the same in all honesty. Bell isent going to come out to your office to check wiring any quicker if you pay for a managed service. The managed service option is tipically one of two things. One being that they check your data connection, and call you if they can't ping your router, two, if your loop alarm goes off, they call you.
You mean the part in the moderator's comments???
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
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
I was confused about that VA/midwest too, until I read it a second time. The /. guy who posted the story is in VA, and the guy who submited the story in the midwest (Minnesota if I read the comments right). The clue is where the underlining stops (lynx, probably italics or bold in other browsers) is where the submitters comments stop and ./ comments start.
Well my dad was looking into just this, he has an unlimited local calling plan with a great number of pop's in his local dialing area. While the connection is shitty (19.2kbps) it does work and costs him no additional ammount (he already has a dialup account and the cell plan).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hi!
Thanks for your response. I think perhaps I may have confused you with my comments about working while I'm at a horse show.
The T1 circuit: there isn't a plan B. I'm pretty plugged-in to the local technology scene (I've been active in economic development organizations, etc.) and I'm certain that there isn't a public Internet presence (cafe, etc.) for at least 40 miles. We don't have any risk of a direct hit by lightning--we're adjacent to a high-tension line, so any lightning is going to hit the tower in the park, not us. I see your point: we could smoke a Smart Card, replace it, and see the new one smoked a few minutes later. We don't see a one-to-one correlation between electrical storms and smoking Smart Cards--we usually don't see a problem. So I view the possibility of smoking two cards within a few hours as a relatively low risk.
Horse shows: I'd never even think about trying to VPN into a client from a horse show. If I'm working that remotely, I'm doing development work. If I need to talk to a client, I'll call to ask a question. And if there's an opportunity, I'll mention that I'm at a horse show--in effect, saying "don't you wish you had my job?" What I'm doing is marketing the "Murdoch from the woods" image--it works with the clientele.
Your idea of having pre-identified fallback points is a good one. I'm not the only geek out here in the woods--a pal a few miles away develops imaging software (http://www.badertech.com). We've talked off and on about doing different stuff to make ourselves more secure--swapping tapes (which we do now and again), emergency recovery, etc. But all we've really done is talk--I'm seeing him later today for coffee, and it might be a good idea to bring it up. Thanks!
You have to remember though, those are people who don't know what they have. They most likely have nobody who has ever done work on a router, nor understands how a t1 works. They just rightfully so expect it to work.
Who do you work for? I'm going to guess a CLEC, or a small ILEC with CLEC operations.