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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
With respect, I disagree. I am spending that kind of money, for that kind of bandwidth. For a couple of reasons:
I'm an independent consultant. I use VPN to connect to clients, and I use VPN to let associates connect to me. I choose to live in a rural area along the Appalachian Trail--but I work for clients in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, and Allentown. I'm not a telecommuter per se--but I face the same challenge: being taken seriously.
If they don't take you seriously, you're toast:
The original poster has decided to leave the big city and move to the Midwest. But he's still working for the company office in Manhattan. He has just been through the telecommuter's worst nightmare: he couldn't get stuff done because he couldn't connect. He fulfilled the predictions of the nay-sayers at work: he wasn't able to get something done. That has hurt his standing with his peers and with his management--it has hurt his credibility.
Going after the local phone company for compensation is a waste of time. What he has to do is ensure it never happens again--which means that he has to identify a super-reliable technology, and assume personal responsibility for the problem. In management buzz-speak, he has to own the problem. Bitching about the lousy phone company is not "owning the problem"--doing something about it is. Spending $250 per month for a 256k circuit means taking ownership of the problem--if he has five 9s of reliability (which equates to 4 minutes of downtime per year) there's a pretty good likelihood that he's going to have better reliability than the office in Manhattan. When he has better uptime than they do, he looks a lot more serious, a lot more credible, than somebody frantically driving halfway to Chicago to find a Kinko's where he can use a web browser. (Tip from us hicks: Kinko's are not everywhere. And if you need a web browser, its a lot easier to go to a public library. They're all wired.)
There is another dimension to this:
He's telecommuting to an office in New York. Office workers in New York look down their noses at anybody else--somebody who announces that he's leaving the NY Metro area for Indiana is beneath contempt. He is not to be taken seriously. But--he definitely moves to the "did you hear about Bob?" list when he announces that he has a T1 circuit. (That's its only fractional is immaterial: in fact, he's got a full-bore T1 to the CO. But Bob doesn't need to share all the details.) And when Bob demonstrates better uptime than the office LAN, and hosts a presentation on his own web server, and then mentions that he's paying $400 per month for his mortgage payment...a lot of people might just wish that they were Bob.
You can live and work in rural America. There are savings (my house costs less, my insurance costs less), there are lifestyle benefits (I'm a 4-H leader, and we have 4 horses), but there are costs too (the T1 circuit, the money we spend on gas to go anyplace). There are downsides to the lifestyle (it's a long way to a restaurant that doesn't have laminated menus or a drive-thru). But to be successful out here, over the long term, you absolutely must demonstrate consistency and reliability.
A friend of mine, a long time ago, said that "you're only as good as your tools." He was talking about electrical equipment--but its just as true with computer equipment. If you're doing email from home at night and you live in a commuter suburb--hey, get a DSL line. If you're connecting to the corporate network full-time from an office in your home, don't bet your career on that DSL circuit. And if you're going completely remote--moving 800 miles away from the office like the original poster has done--you have to provide absolute reliability. You need every single one of those five 9s.
And don't forget...
If you have rock-solid bandwidth, you can easily implement VOIP. Which, for our friend from Indiana, makes him a technology leader....
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.