I don’t know what kind of Inter­net access work are using (well, I know who they’re using: it’s not quite the same), but they should seri­ously think about chang­ing things around a bit. Aside from wierd peer­ing issues a few months back, now they’ve just dropped off the face of the planet for *counts* I think about three days now. Pre­dictably, some­one is point­ing the fin­ger at Telstra.

Every­one always points at Tel­stra. Cus­tomers don’t care whose fault it is — they’re pay­ing whomever to pro­vide a reli­able ser­vice, not Tel­stra. Upstream contracts/networks are some­one elses’ respon­si­bil­ity altogether!

It’s pretty abysmal that it takes three days to get Inter­net ser­vic­ing more than 100 peo­ple work­ing again… Sigh.

I’m here at home on per­fectly func­tional Inter­net, but the things I’ve needed to do the last few days have involved the project web­site which has been equally unavail­able. If I were a full time employee I’d have been paid for two days of doing noth­ing this week… why don’t peo­ple take redun­dancy a bit more seriously?!

It also may or may not be diplo­matic for me to whinge about the cor­po­rate VoIP ser­vice they’re using at this point… it’s still work­ing (pre­sum­ably a sep­a­rate link alto­gether), but it sounds like a really bad pre-DECT-era cord­less tele­phone ser­vice, and that’s when your ears aren’t being blasted by the sounds of a modem as you dial in.

Grum­ble grum­ble. I might delete this post later if I think bet­ter of it… for the minute, suf­fice to say Josh is in a pretty bad mood about qual­ity of ser­vice he’s meant to be depend­ing upon. I learnt last week that I don’t have the free­dom to nego­ti­ate ser­vice con­tracts (yes, even where none expressly pro­vid­ing that kind of ser­vice yet exist — think mobiles…) which made me a lit­tle upset (because I thought I’d done really well talk­ing with a cer­tain ven­dor who will remain name­less), but saw the point of it all. But when reli­a­bil­ity gets this bad, for an all-online ven­ture, I am afraid to entrust host­ing to that kind of envi­ron­ment. You can get really good host­ing in Oz for way under $300/month (and even less if you’re pre­pared to com­mit to con­tracts, because that’s the way most Aussie providers do things) — not nec­es­sar­ily myth-of-the-nines host­ing (Seg­Pub are one host­ing com­pany with a really good rep, but they only do a 99.5% SLA), but waaay bet­ter than three days of down­time in a month.

In case you were won­der­ing, that works out to about 90% avail­abil­ity per annum. And it’s not nec­es­sar­ily going to flake out at times no-one is using it, and, given the demo­graphic, it’s not an office-hours-only kind of ser­vice. And I wouldn’t be look­ing at alter­nate ser­vice providers because…?

(Yeah I’ll prob­a­bly pull this arti­cle soon… just wanted to whine.)