Corporate Internet ouchage

21 Feb 2007

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.)