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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?
> 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.
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."
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.
"If my Internet connection is down- I go home."
If my Internet connection goes down, then I have to go to work.
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.
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*
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
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!
> 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
Except for the fact that both the ADSL lines go over the same copper bundles from the same CO from the same LEC regardless of whether or not they come from the same ISP. Most businesses feel that $600/mo for Internet service isn't worth the price until they realize how they've built themselves into a corner.
A sad fact is that most small and medium businesses will go through this pain and suffering at least once each year for several years before learning better and, in the end, spend more and lose more money trying to do Internet on the cheap than paying up-front to do it the right way. And while it seems sensible and cost-effective to host mission-critical services in-house, the reality is that if they are truly mission-critical and you can't afford proper redundancy, than those services are best off being hosted or deployed at a co-lo center that does provide N+1 redundancy and 24x7 business-class service and support.
Lessons learned:I've been out of the small/medium business consulting market for a few years now. But when I was consulting I encouraged customers to host or co-lo all mission critical applications and use terminal services (Windows remote desktop) or Citrix for access. The hosting or co-lo center provides all the redundancy and 24x7 service and support, you just pay the bill. The cost was not unreasonably more expensive than hosting these apps in-house when you consider downtime, maintenance and ongoing consulting fees to keep things going.
That's just off the top of my head. I could go on, but then I'd have to send someone a bill.--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
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?