How Much Does Your Work Depend on the Internet? 322
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?"
How timely! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No big deal (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Newsletter subscription request (Score:1, Interesting)
*all* of our customer service reps work on a remotely hosted server. If SBC goes out, no one can work. If someone's uploading a file (the development team routinely has to upload 100 MB+ files -- and of course, with a tiny upstream, that can lead to extended idle time on their part), the connection becomes slow as dirt for the duration of the upload.
He knows all this, and these things keep him from working as well. And yet he's reluctant to spend more than $40/month on our most critical resource.
Irreversable Damage (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:How timely! (Score:2, Interesting)
Same here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How timely! (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh huh. Meanwhile, he made a good point. If you need guaranteed services, you have to realize what it takes. Hosting web services in house has some mythical attraction that i've never grasped. Get this, host at a colo that has multiple very fast very reliable incoming connections, and you then only worry about your internal people.
Not much (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Home based design and programming (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Re:How timely! (Score:5, Interesting)
How much we rely on it? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Verizon FIOS (Score:2, Interesting)
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 changed strategies on that recently (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
If Comcast confirmed the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Much more than you can imagine. (Score:2, Interesting)
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".
100% Essential (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
$130 000/hr (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The military does... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
It cost me my entire life (Score:4, Interesting)
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.