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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"
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.
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.
I work for a provider of broadband services. DSL services are the bottom of the barrel. The technology is simply built on top of old technology. There is nothing you can do to prevent downtimes. No provider gaurantees 5 nines 99.999 or anything close for Residential DSL. The increased costs of Business DSL is to cover circuit monitoring and faster response times, many times AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RESIDENTIAL DSL SUBSCRIBERS, so the business class can be brought online again.
Bottom line - if you are telecommuting, it is a business class - pay for it, and THEN you will get special treatment.
No matter what, you will ALWAYS have downtime... that is the nature of the Internet. So, if connectivity is so important, bite the bullet and order cable as a second backup provider, or break out the old dialup modem.
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.
- 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.
Most outages are 1 day or less (it is really annoying when you people call after the service is down for 10 mins complaining -- if it is down more than 12 hours, call otherwise, wait, it isn't that important, really.)
I've learned 1 thing from having Cox Cable internet service out here in Vegas. And that is, the second the modem goes down, call Cox. The reason being that half of the times my modem has gone down, it has been a fault with my modem or the line to my house or the connection at my street or any other number of things that seem to be relegated to me only. No way am I going to waste basically an entire work day just on the hope that it is a system-wide problem and not just me. I would rather call up and "bother" tech support to make sure I'm not the only one. I've actually run into 3 or 4 techs that gave me the same kind of attitude you gave in your post. Granted, I only pushed hard enough to get 1 of them fired, but that kind of mentality, particularly from people that are supposed to be there to help, is just inexcusable. If people calling up tech support when things aren't working is "really annoying" to you, then perhaps you should look for a different line of work.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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
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