IP: RE: A personal view from your IP Editor -- A missed Broadband Opp ortunity

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>From: Anthony Dye <ADye@evokesoft.com>
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>Subject: RE: A personal view from your IP Editor -- A missed Broadband Opp
>         ortunity
>Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 14:43:01 -0700
>X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
>
>You can send this out if you like...
>
>My company (Evoke Software) was completely abandoned by Northpoint AND our
>provider, Verio. Verio made only the barest of efforts to contact us about
>the impending demise of Northpoint; the email address they had was bad (typo
>on their part) and they made no effort to phone anyone from the company,
>even though they have numerous contact numbers for us. If we hadn't paid a
>bill, I'm sure they would have been in rapid contact with us... but customer
>service is not their strong point. Verio no longer provides new DSL
>accounts, even for their Northpoint users. Our San Francisco office uses
>Verio and Covad, but Verio wouldn't give us a Covad line. They offered us
>free dialup for 60 days... of course, we only have 4 analog lines for
>dialout, and we'd have to open up our firewall in SF to let the connections
>in.
>They also offered to upgrade us to T-1 access (30 days to install), or else
>we could call Earthlink and maybe get DSL from them...
>
>So, Monday morning, our entire Austin office was suddenly without access to
>the net. Time Warner Cable says it'll take 90 days to get us cable modem
>access, SWBell can get us a new DSL line by Thursday of next week.
>
>Both options stink... we're sharing modems, 10 people to a connection, until
>SWBell can get out here.
>
>Lesson? No business should go with DSL if they can possibly avoid it. The
>lack of a SLA means that outages can last for hours, or days, or forever,
>and companies have no recourse, legal or otherwise. SWBell won't even
>prorate your bill for the downtime. They make no guarantees of uninterrupted
>service, either. Get a fractional T-1 if you can, and if not, make sure all
>your public servers are co-located somewhere else.
>
>And make sure you've got a different connection set up for emergencies. When
>you consider what it's costing us to be without net access, the cost of
>maintaining a 128K ISDN line is pretty insignificant.
>
>-Tony Dye
>  Technical Services
>  Evoke Software



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/