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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.
> 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?
If my Internet connection is down- I go home.
No reason to lie.
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."
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...
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.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
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.
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
The way I have SA set up, scores up to 3 are green, 3-6 are held for my personal review, and 6+ are rejected outright. I settled on those scores after a month of testing...never saw a legit non-newsletter message score higher than 3.1, and I've never seen a legit newsletter score higher than 4.5.
Thankfully, our server only handles ~5000 emails a day, and that leaves about 30 a day I review. I know that I'm in a special situation, where at a larger organization I wouldn't be able to do that. But it works.
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.
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.
Deleted
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*
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.
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 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!
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.
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 suggest you get your own local test environment (IIS box, Apache box, etc) - regardless of the internet connection being up or down, you'll get far more work/testing done if it's hosted locally.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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!
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.
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.
> 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
If he didn't want to loose that much money maybe he should have bundled it tighter.
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.
Does stealing my neighbor's unsecured wireless AP count as a redundant connection, if he's on Comcast cable and my primary connection is BellSouth DSL?
For sale: Signature. One owner. Low miles. Always garaged. New punctuation, just installed!
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
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
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.
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.