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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?
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.
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.
- 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;
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