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How Much Does Your Work Depend on the Internet?
malord asks: "I work for a small company that has recently had problems finding a stable internet connection. It started when we moved our office in order to upgrade our connection speed. We decided to go with cable internet through Comcast, since they offered the best speed for the price and told us that it would be available before we moved. Unfortunately, Comcast did not provide any service for two months after we moved, so we piggy backed on an existing (slow and unreliable) wireless account with another company in the meantime. When Comcast finally came around, the service that was provided was far from adequate with a consistent 30% packet loss and multiple disconnects everyday, which was confirmed through Comcast's tech support. Throughout this process, we have realized that having a reliable internet connection is more important than having a phone line and almost as necessary as electricity. What would you do if your internet was suddenly like dial-up for weeks at a time? How much money would your workplace lose if it was out for an hour or an entire day?"
On Monday, 8/14, we were due to hook up a T1 line with our new ISP. We hadn't had any severe problems with the old one, but our contract with them was up and they seemed apathetic when looking at negotiating a new one. So, we were going to cut over the lines, run the services concurrently for 2 weeks, and then terminate the old one on 8/28. On Saturday morning, our line went down at 1:01 AM. I was in the office at 6 AM Saturday, and I was NOT HAPPY to say the least. Tech support, however, seemed happier beating off than trying to help. They told me they'd give me a call back. The line was down all weekend. Monday was an exercise in frustration; instead of taking 2 weeks to do a changeover to avoid any interruption, we did the whole damn thing at once. We were up and running, completely changed over, DNS and all, by 4 PM.
You may think: hey, that's not bad. You only lost one day - really less than a full work day. Oh, but that's where the pain comes in. I run all our services in house: Goodlink (a Blackberry-like system), Exchange 2003, DNS, everything. Plus, while the lines were down, anyone who called our office heard five rings and was then disconnected. The loss in customer service is irreparable to one major client, and three unbelievably important emails were lost forever - the kind where the intended recipients weren't really in a position to say "Hey, can you resend that for me?" We'll never know exactly how many emails were lost. In a world that works 24/7, business never stops, and an important email that comes in at 3 AM is just as critical as the important email that comes in at 9 AM sharp.
Direct answer to your question: Our T1 line is beyond essential to the daily operation of the organization. It's absolutely mission critical that we're connected at all times, without interruption or major packet loss.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Wouldn't the sending email server have continued to retry for four days or so? And wouldn't the sender have gotten a notification that the message failed if it had?
Wow, what an amazing conclusion. Next thing you'll be explaining that lower contention and higher service levels are why business class DSL is sold at premium. Please, keep us informed of your awesome discoveries.
Should read "How much does being at work depend on having the Internet?"
In my role, Internet access is extremely useful for looking up information. For example, it can point to a vendor fix, software updates, howtos, etc.. We could conceivably get by without Internet access for a few hours, but invariably there's something that's online that we need whether it's pricing information, manuals (thousands of systems, impossible to locate a particular dead-tree manual), software (wget for AIX, for example), etc..
At home I need reliable Internet to do work (just VPN'ed in to make a change a few minutes ago), check work email, contact vendors (stupid Dell laptop), and do remote administration.
> We decided to go with cable internet
Mistake #1.
You're a business. There's no reason a business should be using anything less than SDSL. It costs more for a reason - it's reliable.
quoth http://www.speakeasy.net/business/dsl/
> Symmetrical dedicated line DSL with throughput SLAs, rigorous uptime and repair time.
That means they guarantee it'll be fast, it'll work, and if it doesn't, they'll fix it fast.
If a couple hundred per month for internet is too much for your internet-dependent business it sounds like you've got bigger issues than packet loss.
'Course I have a backup connectin through the bluetooth connection on my cellphone and T-Mobile's unlimited data service. Which leaves me in the perfect position to score with the hot sales babes if our provder's border routers ever go down. Aww right!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm on PlusNet btw. I raised a ticket yesterday. Today, they traced the problem to their LLU supplier Tiscali and did something to my PPP profile, it's been fine so far. Their service has been pretty good as far as I can see. They know there's a problem, they're working on it.
If you depend on the internet and your internet connection is fubar then by definition you are fubar. If your supplier is telling you to go f*ck yourself by denying there's a problem or refusing to fix it then change suppliers. They are in breach of contract.
Deleted
If your company relies on consistent Internet connectivity it's your responsibility to provide redundancy. That could be a completely redundant system, a failover to a different ISP or support contracts to ensure that you get repairs within a certain amount of time. "My company lost money because my ISP sucks". Nope, your company lost money because you failed to plan for failures. Your bad.
If my Internet connection is down- I go home.
No reason to lie.
I'm a freelance writer and copy-editor. Every single job I've had since 1990 (apart from 6 weeks picking strawberries in 2000!) has been got from contacts on the internet, and has needed internet access to communicate with my employers and clients and to send the finished work back. My present contract involves preparing someone's memoirs for publication, with links to further information on everything he writes about. Without the internet for even a day, I'd be in serious trouble!
My company would almost cease to exist if the Internet went down locally. I mean, it would be the end of life as we know it. That's why we are going to invest (in the new office building) in two seperate connections to the World Wide Web, with two completely independant companies.
Using two ISP's is a relatively untapped resource today, much like mirroring hard disk drives in a RAID array was a few years ago. Today, nobody will build a server without at least one redundant drive. I believe Internet connections should be the same way. How often do businesses complain of "sorry, our network/Internet is down" and lose customers? Do a Google search on a "Dual-WAN" router and see there are a few products around. I love my HotBrick LB-2 router that I use at home. There are about half a dozen people that can easily stress a standard RoadRunner connection. Using my friend's DSL connection going to the same house, it both load-balances and has failover capability. I don't even think twice before unplugging my cable modem. Without any downtime, the router will use the DSL line to pick up the slack.
Is it affordable? Well, that's the same question people were asking about mirrored hard disk drives years ago. The question becomes, is it nessesary? I'm not willing to move into a house that doesn't have the availablility of having two ISP's.
Aj
How Much Does Your Work Depend on the Internet?
Pretty much all of it. But then, look at the crowd you're asking.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
How much money would my workplace lose if we didn't have connectivity for an hour or even a day? None. In fact, we don't have an internet connection or even a dedicated fax line.
Hooray for state parks!
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
for a 1/2 hour connecting to the mainframe, we lose thousands of dollars. That is why all the tech people have company paid for cable lines run to their homes. Those are business class cable lines, with 24 hour garunteed fix times (yeah right). Does this help you to understand?
Ok any one else ever get a dial up customer in town, claiming, im looisng thousands of dollars cause i can't use my 19.95 dialup account? God that pisses me off.
So if my companies network connection goes down and I can't vpn in....I'm not coming into work... Plus 90% of communication in my company is via e-mail/IM's.... we're pretty much screwed... Plus all of our hosted sites would get really really pissed at us as they couldn't do any business... Plus there would be a riot.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
dude, that would be the end :-)
If the line does go down, we go play office basketball. Okay, even if it doesn't break down, we play it, but still...
So... Why do you have only one of them? It all comes down to money, did you lose more than the T1 costs when you lost the major client? If so then the IT directors/CIO's f*cked up.
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I'd bitch like crazy - to the cable co, to the regulators, etc. That tends to get some results.
I remember when we moved our offices it turned out our current dsl provider didn't serve the area, a T1 fro Verizon was hideously expensive for too little bandiwdth. We ended up going with Cox, we've got a 10mpbs link to them, and then two 2mbps feeds to our other offices. Works very well.
However when they had New England Line drop the runs from the MDF to our point of presence, they used stranded connectors on solid conductor wire. When reps from the state I.T. unit and from Atrion were there they noted lots of CRC's on the lines. I told the that it was the cable ends. Sure enough, Cox came in and re-did them and lo and behold no more CRC errors.
I did ask Cox to re-wire so that it came in via our patch panel, on which we'd left space for the 3 lines. They've never delivered on that so one of these days I'm just going to go in with the wire cutters, chop each line and make them come and wire it the RIGHT way.
Does anyone here keep multiple internet connections at home?
I currently have microwave fixed wireless and i'm considering getting a cheap dsl or cable package as a backup. I work from home and since i'm paid hourly it costs me dearly when my connectivity drops off.
I run a hosting company. What do you think?
We had the same problem with Comcast here as well. They were largely unresponsive to our requests for assistance. After suffering with it for about 3 months, I finally convinced the boss to dump the money on a replacement. I called Comcast and explained to them that their service was unsatisfactory and we would be stopping it, breaking the contract and no longer paying them anything. It was fixed within a few hours and we have not had trouble with it since. Get tough with them. I think they save all the good technicians for when the customers threaten to leave. Typical.
We have two dedicated point to point T1 lines running from Connecticut to New Jersey because connectivity is that important.
If we lost connectivity between those sites, productivity for the duration would go down probably 60%. If we lost connectivity for an extended period of time our customers would start complaining and probably our suppliers too.
If we lost connectivity to the internet, however, probably the only thing that'd be affected is communications to our international sites and our phone system. We'd switch back over to landlines for the employees and the people that really needed it would use their cell phones.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
imho - any business to which internet access is mission critical needs redundant providers.
Dedicated T1s are more expensive and provide less speed, but they are typically very solid.
And THAT'S why redundant feeds from different providers is necessary for any peace of mind. By the time I left my last job I had two T-1's from different providers entirely (I checked to make sure the cables were physically different coming at us via different paths), plus a third fiber optic feed. I was close to adding cable as a fourth. If the Net went out at that place I would have literally hundreds of people pissed within ten seconds. So have redundant feeds, redundant routers, redundant servers, redundant backups. Did I mention that redundancy is important?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Quick question. How do you deal with email rejected as spam? The right email can make or break an entire company--as it looks like you've seen. Whitelist certain potential customers?
It's amazing how things changed in ten years, the computer feels truly neutered without the net.
Which reminds me, if the internet is down, is there a good firefox extension or other thing that saves almost everything that one surfs? Scrapbook is nice, but requires manual use from what I have seen. The cache doesn't cut it either.
I can't recommend them highly enough. Pick-up-after-a-few-rings, by-a-person-who-can-talk-dBs-and-DNS grade service, 24/7.
And that's on their residential product.
Is it cheaper/better to...
1: Buy an SDSL business service from one supplier, with SLAs, rigorous uptimes and repair times.
or...
2: Buy cheap ADSL services from two or more suppliers but forget the SLA, uptime and repair time guarantees?
I strongly suspect that (2) is the cheaper and more robust system.
Deleted
Verizon EvDO comes to mind. Sprint offers a similar service. There are sometimes local LMDS providers. Cable, DSL, ISDN, T1 (it's not always as expensive as you think).
An EvDO or similar data card is typically around $60/month, and can be used by travelers to boot. Every business should have a backup when affordable, and this one is....
At my present workplace, if there's no service for more than 30 minutes everyone in my department ups and leaves.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
So . . . it's the cable modems fault?
Do you hire yourself out as Tech Support? I mean being able to troubleshoot a connection from halfway across the country without even having to examine anything surely makes you some pretty good money.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Are you completely fucking braindead?
I'm going to put it to my CIO that we throw out the 2600 and layer 3 switching, cancel the dedicated line and replace it all with a "Motorola Surfboard cable modem" and residental connection. Thanks for the tip, you're a total genius.
Working sucks, and therefore I hope the internet goes down. If it did, my company would be screwed until it came back up. I would have the day off, and I could go home and play games. If MY internet connection went down, THAT would be terrible.
You take it, I don't want it...
While I'll admit that a good cable modem can make a lot of difference over a bad one (and when I've had cable, the surfboard behaved admirably), a sketchy modem is one of many places that cable can have problems.
Help I'm a rock.
Now, if the local network was down (that is the one I use), I'd be SOL in a minute. That tends to happen when /home is mounted remotely.
I work from home as a freelance web developer / web development consultant. During the work day, Internet connectivity is as necessary for my work as oxygen is for my body.
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
As a home-office entrepreneur, I rely on the 'Net almost all the time. That extra 1% is pedalling to the Post Office. Cox network's consumer cable modem/phone connection has been very reliable.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I'm a moderator on 2 forums so my internet is absolutely necessary although I do take disconnected vacations a few weeks every year but if my internet goes down I have my cell phone with a data plan. Luckily I don't have comcast so its usually up and running, but half hour outages are very frustrating. My ISP is Road Runner from Time Warner Cable.
I own a retail business, and although we do use the Net for several things (credit card processing, music, web site sales), I would never depend on it. It's still several order of magnitudes less reliable than electricity and a land line. We use it every day, but I have backups for everything that we do with the Net, and Web sales aren't going to make or break us. I think that making your entire livelihood depend on an Internet connection is very foolish at this stage in the game.
I'll give it another 10-20 years, then *maybe* it'll be reliable enough that I would bet the farm on it, but not yet. The Internet is still the Wild, Wild West, complete with tons of criminals and people looking to tear shit up. It's all just cobbled together between ISPs, and of which could get a hair up their ass and ruin you instantly. Ever get black holed by some pimply, self-important spam fighter? It's happened to me before, and could happen at any time, at the whim of one annoyed person at Spamhaus. How about the ever-changing laws, regulations, and fees?
Um... It's pretty much been standard practice since day one. It's how the Internet provides robust routing. All businesses relying on their network should be doing it. Diverse home networks? Depends how important your porn supply is to you.
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This whole issue falls under disaster planning. The terms does not just cover terrorist attacks and acts of god...
My father is currently an executive director for a billion dollar/year company, managing the disaster plan and more. They do increasingly more bussiness via telephone and internet, though its probably still mostly "storefront." Regardless, if the internal network went down (it spans much of New York City) or the net connection died, they stand to lose over USD $1,000,000/day (on an off day).
When your net connection is that critical, you do several things to protect it. First, have more than one peering point (wrong word?) with your primary ISP (i.e. 2xT1's). Second, have another ISP providing online backup service. The secondary ISP does not need to be as high bandwith/price as the primary (i.e. bussiness cable). Lastly, COLOCATE!! Offsite servers provide unparrelled redundancy.
Anyway... on a small scale, it is really cheap to provide backup net service. In a 50 person company, a second net connection (dsl if primary is cable or vice versa) is really not too expensive.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
I run my own company from a home office. I do web & print design, php/mysql coding, app installations and customizations for people's sites.
;)
I've lost power -- 2 hours this week, one friday for 24 hrs into saturday, etc. on several occasions. Losing power is disasterous.
I have lost internet without losing power, but far less frequently. There's only so long the cable modem stays up on a UPS
Without power, my laptop battery goes from 2-4 hours. I can still usually code and design for a bit, wrap up to a good pause point, etc.
If the power is out, and I don't want to waste my laptop battery, or if all my projects are live web installs, I'm pretty screwed.
There's a caveat though -- when a nasty thunderstorm rolls through, we power everything down, unplug my laptop, unplug the cable line from the cable modem etc. I've seen a lightning strike on Long Island NY take out EVERY ethernet card on the lan -- and if it was on the motherboard, it took the motherboard with it (not to mention the damage it did to the phones and TV in the house). So when a storm rolls through, anything metal connected to outside (we have overhead power and cable) is unplugged...might as well have a power or cable outtage. I wish I were kidding about the LAN damage, but I helped replace every NIC card on that network and helped replace the fried computer...
---- I'm out of your mind!
we're right on the border to where Medicom and Comcast seperate.. and verizon is simply a joke.. I've actually contacted the President of Verizon for Delaware's district, to no avail.. One of those typical, "I'll get back to you on that" phone calls.. For us to get DSL, would require them to spend a few thousand dollars in running new lines underground, as well as special hardware for the fucking FIBER FED PG BOX literally a hundred yards from our office.. Cable companies have also said, that they'll need to dig underground, costing thousands, just to lay some cable to our little warehouse..
I've thought of every possible solution, and they are either too cost worthy, or they simply won't work.. we can't afford to have downtime, and dialup is better than nothing at all.. but I did do the math, and we lose a maximum of a 1000 hours every year in productivity due to waiting for pages to load, uploading high res images for products, and the bulk submission of hundreds of ebay items.. ahh well.. i've definitely gotten used to it, but it makes me wonder how much more money we could make, if we just had a faster internet connection.. I certainly understand that even a crappy satellite investment could help us out big time.. but my bosses are still struggling to pay the monthly bills, so its really out of the question until someone like Verizon, Mediacom, or Comcast can offer a decent $30-70 a month internet connection..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
You mean, you have an SLA agreement on your cable modem? SLA's are there to protect both customer and the business offering them. Most likely it wont be out at all, but they need to cover their a**es
The company I work for maintains large databases, and sells institutional subscriptions to them. If we lost internet access, none of our customers would be able to connect, and we'd have to go back to mailing them digital media. Unless all our would-be competitors lost internet access at the same time--I wager we'd be in a wee spot of bother.
Hence, the company I work for does not get our Internet connection via Comcast... that would be suicide.
Keller Texas, has fiber to the curb in every nieghborhood!!!!! Visited my brother last week. He walked me down to a box on the side of his front lawn. Freak'n unbelievable. Fiber, sticking right out of the ground!!!! Best place on planet earth to open an internet based business. Google housing in Keller. Take a look at the housing value. Roughly 5000 sqare feet for $500K. Stunning place to live. Everything is brand new in Keller. Just out side Dallas. Twenty minutes from DFW. Forty straight days of 100F plus heat, but hey, you can't have everything.
I am a manager in a call center for a hotel and everything we do is connected via a variety of networks. We have 10 call centers in the US and Canada and a number of other centers in other parts of the world. Recently all the North American centers except ours have switched to a VOIP setup. I haven't experienced the setup yet, but it is supposed to be easier for phone agents as more information can be provided to them prior to actually speaking to the guest. What I have experienced however is the frustration of that network going down. Other centers can't take the calls that are allocated to them, and they all get routed here, our agents get incredibly taxed and it's bad for business overall. While the outages are generally short, no more than about a half hour at the most, it is incredibly bad for business. From my standpoint it does seem that it benefits us to not be on the system, as we are really the only backup they have at the moment. So, at least for now it is job security.
You shouldn't be using consumer-grade anything for business-critical functions.
Did you learn your lesson from this incident? Did your boss?
I suspect that, at least, 25% of the Slashdot readership uses a search engine to look up things like UART, C-language terms (e.g., printf), Perl-script concepts (like regular expression), etc.
25% of the readership could not do their jobs (at their frugal companies) without the Internet and a search engine. I speak from experience.
We just hooked up a 100mbit link to our data center at the Last.fm office, so we have 100mbit internet now.. very handy. Can't get any work done without it, as our staging servers and development platform is hosted with our main servers.
:)
This afternoon a crappy netgear router blew up (you get what you pay for..) and we lost our internet connection a couple of hours before the end of the day.. Perfect timing on a friday, early pub
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Too bloody much! The company where I work for now has moved in January. Since we were told (too late) that there was not telephone available at the location, we were offered VoIP. That's where the trouble started. The VoIP ran over ADSl, for which you need a phone-line, which wasn't there. We've fought our way through four months of ZERO connectivity (and a few lawsuits). Count the losses.
Currently, I'm in the process of setting up a new company. We will rely on the internet even more, since we will develop web-apps. My biggest nightmare? "Sir, the datacenters with your servers in it burned down to the ground. We will provide you with new connectivity and new servers in about a month... Now go tell YOUR clients!"
Needless to say, the first earnings will be used to rent space in other datacenters. And we will be sure to never rely on one single internet-connection / phone-line again.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Technically, gooks are Koreans (the word guk in Korean actually means country, and Koreans refer to themselves this way when distinguishing from waiguk, foreigners.) I believe the racist term used for Chinese is chink. Hey, you should set up a rule for Vietnamese, too? You could call them VC.
Your IT guy should be fired. If you don't have one you should consider it. Also, tell your boss to stop using AOL, because it just makes you want to leave the company and work for someone intelligent.
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
We've been using the business class of Verizon's FTTP service for a few months. Their entry level is $100/month, and they give you a solid connection, no nonsense, and 5 public IP addresses. They do the install and everything.
We've been pretty happy with it, but recently Verizon seems to have been doing maintenance, and connection speed has gone downhill. This is not typical, however.
An added advantage of using Verizon for the connection is that they also provide residential connections. This allows those in the local area to have faster access to videos that are hosted by us.
Another disadvantage of FIOS is that Verizon, being a large corporation, isn't very good at providing quality and timely telephone customer service. I waited an hour once, being transfered all around the country, trying to get instructions for using the free dial-up from anywhere service that is included free with the package.
Overall, I've been happy with FIOS, and would recommend looking into it if it is available in your area.
I'm actually at work right now, but I am about to go home and work from home for the next few hours, because they are moving our data center, which means the main network will be down. I will have no way to support our clients from here, since we typically use WebEx. No internet connection = no support. We do have some clients who still use modem, but I would say we typically only use that route about 5-10% of the time, which means that 90% of my job relies on the internet.
will need it for windows updates, av updates and so on.
Dude:
I telecommute as the editor of a fairly lage magazine (circ. ~ 100k). Net outages or low bandwidth are killers to us (I up- down-load hundreds of megs of text and photos daily). Because I am in a rural area, I hve NO choice of ISPs. Were Comcast one of them, I would NOT choose them because of theor lacadasical attutude toward outgoing spm from zombied machines on their network.
Comcast sucks.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Our data center has three backbones coming through here.
:)
If we're down, we know for sure that we have bigger problems than an outage: namely, it's time to crawl into a bomb shelter and wait things out.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Just to help those who don't understand redundancy.
Two providers; A and B. Provider A has a 10% chance of failure, provider B a 5% chance of failure. If you have a single line then you want provider B and have a 5% chance of losing your line. If however, you use both providers at the same time and don't rely on just one of them. You now have only a 0.5% chance of losing your internet connection, assuming both lines are completely independant. The nice thing is that IP was designed from the ground up to take advantage of this feature of probability, it's all built into the routing.
Deleted
Still, the 99.9% uptime SLA with a good business-level ISP is going to serve you better than a consumer-grade ISP with no SLA whatsoever.
I'm a technical writer. I use the web to research the stuff I write about. It's essential. I seem to recall that I was able to do research before I had an internet connection — but I'm damned if I remember how!
I suppose the dependency depends on the nature of one's "business" with the internet. For example a teleworker *might* be lost with "dial-up" connections. Now someone who's home-business is hosted elsewere wouldn't be impacted much by dial-up speeds.
If the internet went down. Everything we use is hosted internally, so all it would do is cut down on people browsing instead of working.
I don't think I've ever seen 500 pair copper strung above ground. Have you ever seen how beefy that stuff is?
Anyway, that's hardly a failure worth concerning yourself about. That kind of scenario has got to be incredible unlikely. Preparing for that is like buying insurance against meteor strikes. You're a sucker if you buy into it.
But there are other benefits to having a high SLA business-type connection.
'Nuff said?
Technoli
is your friend. Er, was.
:D
You can pick up your final check on Tuesday.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I work for an AS/400 shop. No net, no work.
No, seriously. He's completely right.
The business can't function if the office devolves into Lord of the Flies.
Line failure could be handled via dynamic DNS, the voodoo isn't really very difficult, the outgoing connections should be routed fairly normally anyway. In terms of suppliers, a 0.1% failure rate sounds about right for consumer ADSL, so 00.01%, 4 nines isn't bad for a cheapo connection.
Deleted
What exactly do you expect? Anyone who guarantees 100% uptime is either a liar, a fool, or both.
Shit happens.
"You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
The ISP placed their data centre near a major fault line. OK i've heard of bravado but that's taking the piss. "Hahaha mother nature, we have six lines. SIX! Mwhaahaha... Do your worst!" CEO gestures at the ground cackling wildly.
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http://www.savefile.com/files/20972
It seems that the more internet access I have, the less work I get done. And on days our link is down, I get a lot of work done.
You get what you pay for.
You shouldn't be using sub-par services/providers for business-class, mission-critical services. This isn't anyone's fault but the decision-maker that thought they could get by on the cheap.
99.9% uptime SLA guarantee
:( ]
Do you realize that works out to 9 hours of down time per year? Or 10 minutes of downtime per week? Or 2 minutes per business day? While 99.9% uptime sounds good, you have to ask yourself if that's acceptable or not. Granted, it probably won't really be out 2 minutes every day, but more likely will be out for a few hours at a whack a couple of times a year.
Sorry, but if you need more than 99.9% guaranteed uptime, you shouldn't be using a DSL line of any sort. 99.9% is more than sufficient for a DSL line. If you need more than that, it's time to fork over the money to either put your stuff in a datacenter [in the case of hosting services], or pay for multiple gig-e or SONET links. And you'd better have 48 hour UPS capacity, multiple power feeds and a diesel generator with underground tanks.
Getting better guaranteed uptime is NOT cheap. For most office needs, a 99.9% guarantee is quite good. My office is well served by Speakeasy's SDSL, and we couldn't be happier. [Well I could be happier, they laid me off on Monday!
Nothing to see here
If you expect and plan for failure. design your systems so that failure doesn't take you out.
Deleted
I no longer have a T1 to my home office server room. I have a consumer cable modem. I moved my public facing content to a machine at ServerBeach. It's faster, more reliable, and about 1/10 the monthly cost (I live a LONG way from any reasonable POP so a T1 was very expensive).
Now, the stuff clients see is 100% reliable (I have a failover server). The cable modem for my own use works fine -- in fact has been more and more reliable as the cables companies are now trying to compete for phone service and discovering people don't tollerate phone outages nearly so well as cable tv outages.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I'm a webmaster at an educational institution, so obviously if our network is down I basically just can't work. But on those rare occasions that it does go down, it is amazing to see how everyone's work pretty much grinds to a halt. Our department has moved many processes to the web; university stuff is often done by ssh'ing into systems running older curses-based interfaces (yeah, ewww is right); grants to NSF are submitted online; etc.
That's just us staff. Most of the faculty just care about their email (they'll be screaming if it's down), and that they can browse the web (not quite as important to them as their email).
If our local network is okay, then a break in our internet uplink isn't too big a deal for me anyway; it mostly just interferes with my access to references (e.g. Safari Books Online).
#DeleteChrome
I telecommuntute 100% of the time. I am so glad I do not have to use Comcast. Remember this video where a tech fell asleep at a customers hous because they had him on hold for over an hour? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufo9p1O9iAQ They fired the tech as if it were his fault. No mention of any plans to improve service and reduce hold time.
Something like Squid or Polipo. It's no solution, but it can often take less time for you to implement a worplace-wide caching proxy to squeeze just a bit more speed out of it than to wait for the ISP to actually fix the problem.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The internet is super-critical to my job - philosophy. If the internet went down for a day, I would have to go to the LIBRARY!
Yeah let's reject all emails from China. Good business sense. Not.
Enough dinging the guy for a stupid mistake. He learned the hard lesson. And I think he made the point relevant to this article: the internet is a crucially important element of many peoples' lives and livelihoods.
Personally, I can't wait until congress finally legislates Net Neutrality out of existance, so everyone can truly find out how sweet we have things right now (or actually, how sweet we had things in the 1990's).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When our T1 (internet and digital phone) went out, we watched the newly released Pink Floyd Pulse DVD if that tells you anything.
>If a couple hundred per month for internet is too much for your internet-dependent
>business it sounds like you've got bigger issues than packet loss.
Dont be an ass.
A couple of hundred dollars per month is a lot of freaking money for many small companies.
Im sure big shots like you move millions every day but most people dont.
Most people also dont feel the need to insult others to make a point.
Then again, Im not most people and youre still an ass.
with what you said was "since they offered the best speed for the price". If saving money is more important that your internet connection, then stop complaining because you were too cheap to get a reliable service. If your company relies on the internet then cough up the dough and get a reliable connection. If you can't afford to be offline, then spend the money on hardware/software/service providers that will provide redundancy. Otherwise, stop complaining.
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
I work for an online publishing house. If we can't access our CMS online, we can't work - simple as that really.
then why are they not fixing it? I've had comcast for years and have had numerous issues relating to my connection going down when it rained. It took them almost 2 years to come out and reassemble the stupid box in the yard but that still didn't fix anything. Turns out the only way I was able to get it fixed was to move to a neighborhood with brand new wiring (there are houses still being built). Since then, there's been no issues that I can think of.
Yep, wireless and dialup. Net connection is too important to do without.
> How much money would your workplace lose if it was out for an hour or an entire day?
For some of us, we'd probably make massive *gains* in productivity.
- MugginsM
$40 for a business??? Why don't you get all the employees to chip in 10 bucks a month as a christmas present to the company (and their jobs and sanity), and get better service for a year? Once your boss sees that it works, he is liable to grudgingly accept reality and pop for it.
I scanned over several posts about essentially spreading out your network so I thought I'd give interesting input from a large corporations POV.
My company has three of the largest internet providers in the area coming into the heart of their international intranet splitting off in all sorts of complex ways. The arguably most important part being two rics, one of which is an exact mirror of the first, and both have their own redudant hardware inside. All of which can failover if need be.
I wasn't around for the design of the corporate network as a whole, but from what I gather there is no connection that does not have at least two paths. It's extremely impressive, at least to me.
I'm a developer who works for an european company, and I'm abroad.
Well, that's not too much as to say, but interesting things arises when you look at the type of work, the connection needs, and above everything else, the country I live in.
Although I'm european, I'm actually living in a country where internet is highly restricted. Only foreigners can access an unbelievable expensive connection at an unbelievable low speed (dial-up connection). Just to give you the picture: 150 hours/month at 4.5 Kb/s at a cost of $100 per month.
And everything that through a phone line which is shared with the neighbourh
The kinkd of work? well, classical stuff, I do a lot of web-programming (ajax apps, php, mysql and so) for my company, and I also do some administration stuff on my company's network (in europe), and some in our customers production servers, also.
Besides that, my boss needs me to be online most of the time, and I also do some "help desk" of our web applications for our customers through gmail chat.
What I've found is that linux (I'm using it from 11 years ago) had helped me a lot on this. A fair use of cvs, sendmail, retchmail and a lot of crazy combinations of network/utility programs helps me a lot to overcome all the difficulties I have to face just to be 'online'.
Well, I guess this is not much of an 'answer' post. I think the only thing to say is: "there's always a way" and "you better bet your soul with linux".
malord may need a Motorola 484095-001-00 Signal Booster. Check your cable modem's internal webserver at http://192.168.100.1/ and if you do have a weak signal problem like I suspect (see Comcast's support forum and/or the Comcast forum on dslreports.com for how to do the diagnosis) then buy the amp. Yes, you shouldn't have to, but it's your best chance to actually fix the problem. Install the amp at the earliest possible point, before any cable splitters (if you have any).
If Comcast had any brains they'd keep a whole bunch of these in every Comcast service guy's truck and train their people to read the cable modem's signal status page. It'd be a helluva lot cheaper than repeated truck rolls to the same very annoyed customer. Better yet, they'd replace more of their aging copper with fiber before FiOS poaches all their best customers (alas, I'm in SBC/AT&T territory), but that's another rant entirely. Overall I'm reasonably happy with Comcast in my area but I'm still jealous of folks who can get FiOS.
I work at a ISP/WISP - continuous connectivity is not only essential for our ability to do our work, but when a connection fails ANYWHERE (be it a break in our Canopy network, our DS3 going down, or a dialup number being routed improperly) it creates hell for the phone techs in the office (who then proceed to field hundreds of calls relating to it) and our NOC department (which has to try and fix it as quickly as possible with all of the phone techs breathing down their necks. Yeah, it's not the most efficiently managed office.
The internet IS our business, so either it works and we have jobs or it doesn't and our business would go under very quickly.
My company also heavily relies upon a flaky internet (adsl) connection. We choose to backup our landline, and we choose a cellular option as this is a truely diverse option in relation to the other options we have available (which all come form the same conduit!).
We use a Junxion Box model# JB-110e (www.junxion.com) with a Sprint EVDO cellular data service plan. The box has a builtin failover mechanism so it handles the failover when the dsl connection flakes out. The speed is quite good, although large file uploads and the like are a bit slow.
Basically, for $60/month, we have close to ZERO downtime, while also having a very convenient and portable solution for offsite events if they occur. We will probably buy another device when the new EVDO Rev A (highER speed cellular data service) hits the markets.
If you are smaller company or larger but you don't want to deal with BGP (as you can't prove you need /22 network). Consider choosing something like LinkProof from Radware (http://www.radware.com/).
You can load balance incoming and outgoing links and from more then 2 providers and from simple few meg speeds to gigabit speeds. Pretty cool and works great.
The internet depends on my work.
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If ADSL is avilable, then SDSL is available too, it will shoot a further distance over copper than ADSL. Unless there isn't SDSL service out of the central office, but there is usually both.
Oh, and barring either of those, you might still be able to get IDSL, slow but fairly reliable (once you get it working), and barring that, order a freaking T1.
Of course, if you cannot get a T1 delivered, expensive as it may be, move your business, because you are working in an area where rodents should have sex, and that's about it.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Just like anything, YMMV. The last company I worked for had business class comcast for a while but couldn't stand the frequent downtime so the bucked up (like 3x the cost) for SDSL with 50 static IPs. This was a big improvement, but there was still occasional downtime. At home I use comcast with about 5% of the downtime that their SDSL had. There are just too many factors to say that "x" is the only solution.
"I forgot my mantra."
redundancy is important
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yep. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars per hour, 14 hours per day. That's a major player in the oil and gas commodities trading industry. That's why...
Servers are clustered.
Spare desktops are available.
Floor switches are redundant (and on separate power feeds).
Internet service is redundant (through two major carriers).
People have backups who know their job.
All service contracts have specific performance requirements.
If Comcast isn't meeting their stated performance, then they'd better FIX IT NOW! It's their job, after all. Mind you, if they haven't guaranteed anything to you, then they don't have to worry about any more penalty than losing you as a customer.
Get the SLA it in writing, hold them to it, and if they fail, legal action may be neccessary as a last resort.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
How much does work depend on an internet connection? How about 100%? No internet, no business. You cannot be a Massively Multiplayer ONLINE Role Playing Game if you are not online.
Also, remember, some companies have special deals with their "ISP" and cannot have multiple connections from different ISP. Alternatively, management could have been stupid and located themselves where multiple ISPs wouldn't help because there is still one point of failure elsewhere.
Not everyone has an option.
What this comes down to is simple -- it will happen that there are going to be places on earth where running an internet-based business will be impossible.
Would you try to build a business that has a mission-critical need for 600,000 gallons of water a day in the middle of your vast (and impressive) desert? If so, would you expect it to cost no more than it would cost someone near a large river right where it enters the ocean?
In some areas, fixed wireless is available. Since just about all the other options apart from satelite (T1, DSL) go via your local CO, fixed wireless provides an alternative that is more redundant than other options. Speeds up to 10Mbs are available.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Many other businesses and projects are today depending on the availability of the internet. You use it to get current documentation, you use it to promote your services and you use it to communiate between different parts of a project which today with internet access really allows you do run projects on multiple continents. Doing it right may even speed up things. Develop the software in Europe, test it in the US and do fault report management in Malaysia. (Not my idea actually). Gives a new meaning to 'daily builds'...
And the internet is also providing the ability for businesses to serve their own internal telephony in a cheap way without the need for expensive leased line arrangements. Setting up Asterisk servers with IAX2 communications may do the trick.
So YES the internet is vital today for businesses. Actually even more than ordinary telephony. The problem is that not all ISP:s have understood this yet and fails to set up the redundancy needed. One way around this may be to buy internet access from more than one ISP.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"What would you do if your internet was suddenly like dial-up for weeks at a time?"
Buy the pr0n on tape.
My job doesn't depend on the Internet at all. I park cars for a living! VVVRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!! SSSCCRREEEEEEECCHHH! CCCRRUUUUNNCH! :-O No sir, that dent was there when you pulled in.
The military is becoming so dependant on the internet that when the net goes down, many combat support units are unable to do large portions of their job effectively. Combat support does not include the guys kicking in doors for launching artillery rounds downrange. It's all the guys who make ID cards and fill out insurance forms and fix the soldiers financial problems and such. Without the internet we can't connect to the databases we need to get to in order to modify Soldier's data.
Now this doesn't mean we can't do the job at all. It just means we have to switch back to the old paper and mail methods. This is significantly slower obviously, but it works.
It's interesting to me how the military doesn't do this for money, but rather for this idea that a Soldier's life is at stake. So does that mean that these companies that abandon paper methods don't take their work as seriously as the Army? Or just that the risk of saving money by abandoning these methods is worth it in the long run?
Does a day without net really matter? Or as the parent post mentioned, do months really matter?
If your internet connection is mission critical, why go to the lowest bidder in order to save a few bucks (which won't happen when the service goes down, you'll lose money)? When will people realize that for critical services, go for the most reliable you can realistically afford. If it happens to be the cheapest then consider that a bonus, but it shouldn't be one of the main factors in choosing a service. Can you afford a T1 with a DSL backup? How about a DSL with a cable backup, or vice versa? You need to crunch numbers, see how much money/productivity you'll lose for every hour/day without service and decide accordingly.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Even from a less IT-oriented perspective, many engineering firms would have trouble operating with the internet out. Some CAD software (ProEngineer comes to mind) requires you to connect to the internet and register with the server and confirm that you're a real customer and not a criminal in order to use it. So even at previous jobs where I wouldn't have *needed* the internet, I would have been stopped from doing my work anyway. Of course whether its proper for a company to do this is a separate question, but given that companies are going to treat users like they're criminals, we're dependent on internet connections in much less obvious ways.
i work in education and i cant even begin to describe the horrid networking/internet issues our apple servers have given us. our pipeline is limited internally because of a "bug" that apple engineers dont seem to understand yet recognize as a problem (despite their liberal deletion policy on their own support forums on the subject.)
while the teachers would still teach, their ability to share within and without the district would begin to wear them down to the point that they forgo use of this technology alltogether. our inability to find a solution or work-around has caused a number of teachers to neglect the more technologically geared aspects of their courses which becomes all the more frustrating when seeing how the students more than the teachers rely on technology to learn.
Working in Emergency Services, I use the internet pretty much every shift.
I'm expected to know/do something about virtually anything that walks in the door, including industrial toxin exposures, any/all medication overdoses, even "my child ate this weird plant" complaints. I can access pill databases, get radiology reports and images, look up MSDS, and even have a few botany sites bookmarked for exactly that kind of weird stuff.
Standard ER stuff I can do with my eyes closed, but reference materials online are absolutely essential for the bizarre ones, and it's why I have redundant internet connections (one of which I set up and maintain myself).
I'd be far less effective without it.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Not in the slightest.
Email is a useful communication tool, but it's just a tool. It's not the only way for communicating important information, and for the really important information (for example, telling a client that they've wasted 3 years and a couple of million pounds of work), a phone call is much better.
Posting stuff to websites? Works, but it's slow.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I recently switched from my computer tech position to a home-based medical and legal transcription gig. I ftp down audio files from my employer, transcribe the reports, and return the finished work via ftp. No download work, no get paid. This summer, I've worked out on the deck in my yard, from my ex-wife's house in TN, and from various motel rooms I've stayed in during vacations and trips to pick up my son for spring and summer visits. The freedom is awesome, but it makes booking a motel room a real bitch, especially if you want to stop and stay the night in the middle of KY, where internet access is a rarity, to sightsee.
I have been programming for 20+ years. The last 5 or so was done from home. One day I had the brainstorm that since I worked at home I could move somewhere less expensive and with less traffic, so I packed up and moved to east Tennessee.
Guess what I found? They barely have internet here. I had to pay $600 a month for a T1 from Bell South and then found out the infrastructure and/or local workers could not make it run reliably. I had SLAs which were totally ignored. Monthly credits were usually close to the cost. And finally the line went down completely for over a month. I was forced to switch back to dial up, and if I got a 2400 baud connection I felt (feel) special.
Needless to say, I have lost all of my clients, all of my work, they take my car in a month. Moving is not an option for unrelated reasons, but the bottom line is there are still places in the country where internet can not be reasonably obtained (i put satellite in the unreasonable group - it sucks - try VPNing with a dish) and it cost me everything. No this is not made up.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
If your response to having internet out for a day is any stronger than 'oh well, too bad' then at the very least you should blow the money on a cable connection, a DSL connection, and something like the Linksys Dual WAN router to do auto fail over. Even then, you need to understand that neither of those connections have any form of SLA, uptime guarantee, usability guarantee, or the like.
Want a five nines connection with contractual penalties, payable to you, for each minute of downtime? They have them, but they're not $100/month. As in all things, you get what you pay for.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You're a business. There's no reason a business should be using anything less than SDSL. It costs more for a reason - it's reliable.
Very incorrect. In Omaha Nebraska, Qwest's SDSL is a guaranteed nightmare with last-mile latencies from the customer premises to their wire center of 40-80 ms average and peaks above 110 ms. Throughput is marginal though completely variable. Their engineering is mostly copper-wire centric (spent a week trying to find grounding problems in our brand new building which were not present).
Cox business-grade cable Internet uses a different symmetrical technology than what the residential people used. I'm not aware of what the technology is, but for this particular branch office, the Cox connection performs like an engineered T1.
I've worked with too many clients who have gone with small business DSL implementations from Qwest, Iowa Telecom and Frontier - none have acceptable latencies. None behave on bandwidth allocation - pray you're not relying on a DSL carrier out of a smaller community. It took a great deal of pressing to learn that Iowa Telecom was feeding several hundred DSL customers (with advertised speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps) with - you guessed - a single T1.
I've yet to encounter a case where DSL wasn't the last option anyone would want.
I guess you never heard ofSilicon Valley before. The San Andreas fault runs right through there. And there are many major fault lines that run through the Bay Area. It is really hard to build something in California that isn't near a fault line.
> We decided to go with cable internet
Mistake #1.
I guess. Just as a lowly ADSL home consumer, that sounds horrible -- and relevant since I'm helping an older person decide between Comcast and DSL at the moment. With about 16 hours/day including streaming audio in the background and a vanity web server, I spotted _an_ annual outage from about 15 minutes to 2 hours with my DSL from 2001 through 2003. From 2004 to the present, I can't remember the last outage. There might have been one for about ten minutes -- or maybe I just needed the reset I did at my end. I can't imagine multiple drop-outs per day. If you can't shame your local Comcast into competence, I say run, don't walk, to the competition.
We have Comcast where I work. Every January and July/August our connection goes completely on the fritz. The connection will drop and sometimes it will take 2 minutes to 30 minutes (or more) to restore. I have placed many service calls and they just don't seem like they are intersted in getting to the heart of the matter. They don't have anything to track problem locations it seems like and then be able to deduce that they have temperature problem with some device on the line. They always send out a site installation tech who knows like nothing about the infrastructure. One trip they say the signal is too hot and they put an attenutator on. The next time the tech says the signal is to low and takes the attenuator off. Another tech replaces the ground block on our incoming line to the building. One crew replaced our modem to no avail. One tech told me, "All I can do is just replace stuff and hope that fixes it." It is very frustrating because I explain to them that I need a line tech to the support line and they treat me like I am some dumbass average PC user, not someone who has experience in buiding PCs back to the 386 days and working previously for a company debugging communication systems in modem, twisted pair, fiber and radio. "Have you cycled the power on your modem" and stupid basic stuff like that they ask.
I have bitched up and down and it wasn't until I told them once fiber comes in area my boss is goning to switch that they send out two line techs to look into the problem. It was fine for a couple of days, but it is starting to get bad again. DSL just isn't enough bandwidth for a business sending large autocad drawings and documents back and forth and since Comcast has a City granted franchise, we have no other choice right now. I don't have this problem at home, in fact I am very satisfied with the stability of my Comcast service here.
The lack of any reasonable competition for them just makes them complacent.
Yeah a cheap company owner like mine.
Google, and we do sorta depend on the internet.
When my head office had a power outtage that lasted 14 hours, we were all hooped. All sattelite branches were offline for 14 hours. We rely on a client server model using VPN tunneling over the net for all sales and internal communication. So they bought a generator capable of running the server on "Life support" if the power in their city goes out again.
Can anyone tell me if the internet will even work with a city wide power outage?
Wait a second, I'm a nerd. Where do I sign up for my mean steak?
Mmmm.. steak.
Game... blouses.
They don't have to pay to dig up ditches and put cables to your door, and http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 01/2014237 yesterday's article confirms there will be many competitors with a lot of interesting technology by 2010. When you can serve out an 80km cell Line Of Sight with one half-wavelength tower that can hit 80MB/sec in a few years, well... wires will no longer be required. It will be the beginning of real telco/cable competition, because anybody who knows how to work the stuff and pay for the fiber backhaul can be essentially a CLEC.
Considering that we work on machines that are located around the country, we are incredibly dependent upon the Internet. Then again...it is the Internet that gave rise to my job...removing spyware and viruses... We've had a few outages, mainly due to the corporate proxy server(s) dying, hard.
I support remote users for a global NYC-based firm and Comcast recently made some changes to their network in the NYC metro area and now our vpn users basically cannot connect. Now they have to use either citrix or we have to route their vpn connection through a different global node of ours (europe, asia, etc.) to get them connected. - I swear they are about one little speck away from sucking as much as Time Warner does in general.
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For my business, we have our servers located at our class-A facility, where we run BGP and have connectivity to multiple carriers, generators, redundant A/C, etc. For our office, we have cable and DSL. We run our VoIP over the DSL, which is just a slight annoyance if it goes down. Our Internet goes over the cable, and if it goes down a simple script on the Linux firwall switches over to the DSL. I don't think we've ever had both down at the same time, though we do have a couple of outages on each every year.
I'd say that two cheap connections beat any "business class" connection, but that's only if you don't host services in-house. If you host public services in-house, stop. The majority of companies I see doing this really should not be. There are some cases where it makes sense, but a lot where it doesn't.
For example, we have a client that had a T1 that kept going down on them. We offered to host their two servers in our facility, including hardware and management, for $300/month. Instead, they added a second T1 for $500/month. But they never set up anything for doing BGP or otherwise switching between the lines because they didn't want to pay anything more. Of course, their T1 continues to go down regularly, and their second T1 does nothing for them.
So, I'd recommend cheap consumer connectivity, preferably via different sources (like cable, wireless, DSL over POTS) for diversity, and then switch between them to get to your servers.
Sean
I read your post, and I feel your pain. Everyone who works in IT has felt their stomach drop into their crotch when they hear email is down, and emails are getting lost. But I have to say you're probably trying too hard to do everything yourself. There's no way our company can or should pay for the redundancy a DNS server requires. I offloaded all our DNS info to Speakeasy's DNS servers. They're redundant and easy to configure through Speakeasy's web site. I never have to worry about DNS. If our router starts getting flaky, it doesn't mean our Internet presence suddenly disappears. And as far as ISPs go, I have to say Speakeasy is fantastic. Maybe it's because we have a great account rep (shout out to Chris Lee, if you're reading), but it's one of the few companies where if I call them for tech support, I end up learning something. Speakeasy very wisely hires people who know what they're talking about on the other end of the phone. And DNS isn't the only service we hired out. Email is offloaded to Mailstreet. Our website is on Bluehost. Even Jabber services are hosted by Dreamhost, although I'm not too crazy about that solution (more later). This solution probably only works for company of a certain size. We're a relatively small company, so the amount of money we're paying per email mailbox with Mailstreet is totally worth it. I never have to monkey around with Exchange server weirdness, I don't have to sweat whether or not our backup server is backing up email properly, and if anything bad happens, I call an 800 number and they're incredibly responsive. Same goes for our website. We aren't an e-commerce site, so our website doesn't get hammered, but it needs to be available as often as possible. Bluehost has what appears to be a 99%+ uptime, their support is fantastic, if I ever want to add a feature I go into their web interface, click a few buttons, and presto! PHPBB or PHPNuke or whatever is suddenly up and running. And again, I don't have to monkey with backup tapes (can you tell I hate dealing with backups?) The only hosted service I currently have doubts about is our Jabber hosting on Dreamhost. Jabber services seem like a bit of an afterthought for them, so there isn't great support, and it isn't hard at all to administer a Jabber server, so I think I might pull that back home. Plus Dreamhost's support leaves a lot to be desired. All us IT guys enjoy monkeying around with new servers and services. And when the company relies solely on you for email or DNS, you're a very important person. But that's a crummy way to get job security. I'm not trying to imply that that's why you're doing all the heavy lifting yourself. But job security through obfuscation is a known technique in the IT world. If you're the only guy who knows how to get email up and running, you're king of the world, but if anyone in your company can call Mailstreet for tech support, your value is suddenly less apparent. My advice is to stop worrying and learn to love outsources services. Trust me, you'll sleep a lot better. C
Nice in theory but there are a few other problems with relocating offices just for communications reasons. Its hard to get warehouse space in CBDs, not a lot of road train access, nor rail or heavy port facilities quite hard to get 66kv for operations and almost impossible to mine anything.
Most companies that can afford it in oz tend to use satilite because of the limited infrastucture. Internet access is mission critical when a $200m/yr mine stops because of an instrument and you need a manual fast or you want to order parts for a breakdown etc.
IMO, one of the stranger trends in commercial business networking (I'm considering my experience working in commercial netwoking from ~1996 to present) is the move by customers away from reliablity in favor of CHEAP and MORE CHEAP.
I'm not sure how the mass delusion took place where businesses started thinking they could get reliability for free, but it happened.
Back in the early- and mid-90's we had customers paying big bucks for analog 9.6kbp leased lines. Often, they would also pony up for a so-called dial backup (DBU as we called it) to use in the event their primary connection had a problem. These customer's almost never had a network outage that woud cripple their business.
It's almost impossilbe to describe how for from this level of reliability we've come since "going digital" -- first with T1's and now the terror of DSL. The sad fact is that DBU hasn't gone anywhere as a technology and almost everyone has the option of having a backup connection of some kind.....yet they do not. And the whining that ensues when customers' poor planning comes home to roost? Give me a break.
I say to all: Quit whining!
You're getting nothing more than you pay for. Same as it's ever been. Likewise, the options for redundancy are still there - if you're mad, why aren't you using them?
At my office we are dependent on a remote AS400 system to do billing, purchasing, receiving, shipping, etc. To this end they installed a T1 through (at the time) SBC. This was great at first because our internet connection speed went up allowing our engineers to receive large 3D models and massive pdf files and such.
Unfortunately this didn't last long.
It lasted until the first time it rained really hard. Then it went down. SBC fixed it by changing pairs and we were up and running again.
This happened repeatedly over the next 5 years. Somewhere during the process we upgraded the phone system to use an E1/ISDN PRI circuit that was, unfortunately, on the same set of wires. Now after it rains we either have phones or internet go down. And SBC just keeps changing pairs...
I will say this - no company should ever have laminated signs with the circuit number and "The internet is down." Ever.
Worse yet we have no other connectivity choices than to maybe pay Comcast $10k to run a cable to our building. And their reliability is often worse than SBC from what I hear.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Well, for the most part, an E1 is identical. :) But yeah, speaking as a Melbournian, damn US-centricity. ;)
To determine how much you use the internet for work and for other things you would need to look at your usage and express it as a ratio. I use the internet mainly for work and that is expressed in the fact that my usage ratio (work:other) is 65:35.
Picky picky, T1, E1, whatever. The one is available to me, the other is what I wish was available to me.
And on my own previous post, SDSL is always available where ADSL is available, not the other way around, as I mistated before. I had em reversed, but my point still stands, ADSL is not a replacement for SDSL.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The internet is absolutely critical for our operations. Not only do we have separate internet service for backoffice and production use, we have a backup data center for production and both of our production data centers have fault-tolerant connectivity. All of our office sites and data centers are interconnected so that we can route around any failure, up to and including complete destruction of any of our sites.
When compared against the loss of revenue due to an outage, the cost is actually quite low.