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KPNQWest Admins Keep Bankrupt Network Running
sebastianw writes "Some of the network administrators from KPNQWest, although they have been (apparently) ordered to shutdown the network, took over control of the KPNQWest NOC. They are trying to keep the network running and keep customers up, regardless of KPNQWest's insolvency. The company warned on Thursday that they would be forced to shut down KPNQwest's entire European data network on Monday unless its customers paid their bills in full immediately." There's a related story on the Register, talking about the possible effect on UK internet access. If anyone needs to hire some network engineers...
It's great that they're doing this, but how long can they keep it up? I mean, it's great that they're volunteering like this, but you can only go so long without a source of income. After a few weeks, bills start to pile up, or a major router breaks and needs replacing. Running a network's not ridiculously hard, but it does take money...
I think this is great. Really... Big business could care less about their customers in recent years, but we have these guys generously keeping customsers online...even after they aren't being payed.... This is how customer service SHOULD be done. It is ashame that this is the EXCEPTION and not the true state of an industry in peril.
Likely that's true to an extent, but it's not sustainable. Many large networks routinely run with reduced staff on evenings, weekends, holidays, Star Trek premiers, and off-hours. But there is more to running the network than just keeping it up (maintenance work). What about upgrades or project work? It's hard to move forward with technology if your entire staff is focused solely on maintaining your existing infrastructure.
I'm not saying they likely couldn't trim some fat, but a staff reduction of more than 2/3 cuts too deep.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
Hell, if it weren't for my need to eat, I might put in some free time in a NOC like that one, if for no other reason than to have access to the hardware.
Call it the ultimate training lab. Make any change you want - nobody can really bitch much about it, since they're not paying for it anyway. The only motives to keep things running are to, well, keep things running...
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
Take some powerful countries, like France, Britain Japan, allocating funds for high speed backbones whose bandwidth is provided and distributed by volunteer organizations or other NGOs in the country, distributing mainly by the districts population. Now take laws that say a telcom company should allow DSL for free thru its network by its phoneline customers. Also take government policies that update the speed of the bones every three or so years to the several adjacent countries.
Naturally other nations would follow suit seeing the economic improvement such communications allow. Government run backbones would be kept up to speed and private competitors would be hard pressed to provide higher speeds and lower costs. Once the threshold number of countries have this, the countries that started it would be under pressure to continue providing the service, thus a positive feedback can be attained that sustains Free Internet. Apparently all we need is a few smart politicians in a few powerful countries.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The actions of the guys in Brussels have been an inspiration for the rest of us in the company (those that are left).
I can pretty much assure that the UK network will keep running, definitely one of the main AS numbers of the UK (5571) has alternate transit so do most in-country networks. If anything it's the Eurorings that are at risks but even they are supported right now from Brussels AND The Hague (both IP NOCs are operational right now).
The actions of the last few days make me proud to be part of KQ, Ebone and Netcom and I really hope that we can all survive this crisis, and if we don't, it won't be from the lack of trying or courage.
just another Netcom/Ebone/KQ techie
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
Hmmm,
I find it interesting that they seem to be having trouble with users paying them. The most serious problem I face is customers not paying for the services they receive.
Just shut down one site 2 months ago which was overdue by 6 months... Sortly thereafter got a call berating me for their website not being up. I pointed out that they were past due and stated the site would not go back up until they paid their bill... Couple of days later I had a check.
It supprised me since the site has always been a problem with paying late. I've finally decided to take a no nonsense approach to billing rather than trying to work with customers. I've had too many customers just walk away without paying their bills and thus I have been shedding customers during the last couple of months.
It's definately a lot easier now, without maintaining a bunch of sites that don't pay.
Somehow all of this left me thinking about Atlas Shrugged, but in reverse. In AS the "socialist" forces are trying to ruin the world, but here it's the business world. And people try to keep things running because it's their own interest to do so.
A lot of us local entities are preparing to leave the mothership. Netcom UK is about to go solo again after 2 years under the GTS/Ebone/KQ banner.
;)
KQ portugal and italy are going standalone as well I believe.
We're now all waiting to see who will pick up the network so we can buy cheap transit from our former parent
Seriously though, even though we're going our separate ways, right now we're still one company (apart from KQ NO that got sold already) and we're still running the network, even if we have to do it without the assurance of being paid.
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
Since when has Cisco intentionally made bad hardware? I have found that while their prices are high, it is hard to make the hardware on a Cisco box fail short of running mains voltage through an Ethernet line.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
As a senior systems engineer from a similar organization (Carrier1 (FALCO!)) I can say there were no issue running a multi unix environment, and I've never had any issue with it at any of my previous companies (nor have any of the engineers I've worked with).
At Carrier1 had FreeBSD, Red Hat & Debian Linux, Solaris 9 & 9, HP-UX, even GNU/Hurd and Mac OS X (well, on *my* system
The only problem I've ever had is the fairly trivial (?!) one of getting the command flags right - stuff like the 'ps','route','ipchains, 'ipfw' and 'ifconfig' commands syntax being different, the different flags for package management tools, that sort of thing.
I quickly came to realise that it's not possible to remember all the flags for all programs and remember the best way to do something on a particular system if you are busy all the time, things just seem to seep out. This happens if you are spending lots of time programming or in meetings or working on large projects - in which case you might not touch one type of system for months (until there is a problem with it), at which point you find your self quickly reading man pages and referring to Google a lot. All you need to do is remeber what's improrant, especially things you'll need for troubleshooting, and not worry about the rest - it's enough to know about tool's like Solaris 'ndd' and Linux's 'mknod' and what they do, if you need to remeber exactly how to use them in a given instance you can refer to man pages, O'Reilly Books or Google (which I often find the fastest).
Staying current, reading Freshmeat everyday, installing and configuring new Unixes and new & un-familer packages regularly, being on mailing lists and reading Slashdot are good ways to stay up to date - the more you know the less likely you are to run into something completely unexpected. If your resourceful (which you should be as a Systems Engineer) the only real problems arise went you don't even know where to start, everything else is a piece of cake.
Basically, if you really know unix (and are not just a Red Hat Linux or Solaris flunky who has convinced themselves they are Gurus while they still run Windows 2000 day to day) then you won't have any problems.
Oh, and making lame excuses like 'well I need Windows for work stuff' and 'they won't let me run Unix on my desktop' DO NOT wash - they are just that - excuses for lameness.
I have been for job interviews and been introduced to guys who called themselves (literally!) 'Unix Gods', yet they had only ever used Solaris - if you have any of those you are in deep shit right now. [ Needless to say I ran a mile! ]
Most people fall somewhere in the middle of those two, you'll probably only have one or two decent guys, if your lucky, though if you need to ask you are very possibly in trouble already!
YMMV.