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Telecommuters and Downtime? 327

Posted by Cliff from the keeping-the-communication-lines-open dept.
clearcache asks: "I'm a new telecommuter. My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January. I remain employed with the same NYC company that I worked for when we lived in Jersey. Aside from the normal moving hassles, I experienced some connectivity issues due to the complete incompetence of my telephone company. These issues repeated themselves, and, due to the lack of a good problem escalation policy on their end, it took quite some time to get them resolved (some are not yet resolved!). These problems resulted in a serious loss of time on the job. When I approached the phone company to discuss compensation for downtime, they responded that, since it is a residential line, they do not compensate for downtime. With more and more people telecommuting, it's only a matter of time before the blurred distinction between 'residential' and 'business' telephone lines becomes an issue. Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do? Does anyone have any general advice about telecommuting and pitfalls that I should avoid in the future? How do the companies that you work for deal with your downtime?" When my connections to the 'net fail and I can't find someplace in the area where I can leech some bandwidth, I am forced into taking the day off. Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare. How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work?
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Telecommuters and Downtime? More

Telecommuters and Downtime?

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  • new 'business' class (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CodeMonky ( 10675 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:18PM (#3098206) Homepage
    Well the company does technically have a point that it is a residential line, etc. However I wouldn't be surprised that as things like this start to become news we don't see either a drop in the cost of business class, OR a new 'commuter' class which would hopefully be only a little more a month (than residential) and would come with some sort of uptime guarantee.

    • Re:new 'business' class (Score:4, Insightful)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:39PM (#3098293)
      a little increase in price? are you kidding? haha.

      do you know how many calls a day a support tech would get saying that a user is going to sue for their money that they lost due to downtime. The fact that it is a recreational use service only (or a residential line) doesn't seem to get through their heads.

      If you want an uptime guarantee that's fine. Most people demand lost wages. Sorry but a little increase in cost is NOT going to cover that (probably not guarantee uptime either).

      If you want to pay $50/mo for service you get what you pay for.

      ATTN to cable users: $50/mo is just about the equivilant of a T1 (more than $500). If you want guaranteed uptime then get a real connection.

      • Re:new 'business' class (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jmauro ( 32523 )
        ATTN to cable users: $50/mo is just about the equivilant of a T1 (more than $500). If you want guaranteed uptime then get a real connection

        Or you're getting overcharged for a $500 dollar connection which provides you no more service or uptimes than a cable modem than a T1. The costs of guaranteed uptimes is not the main cost behind a T1. It's the phone companies margins. You can get T1 guarantees on DSL/Cable Modems for 1/10th to 1/20th of a T1's cost and even more bandwidth than a T1. Stop spreading such silly nonsense. The phone companies are required by the FCC to have uptime guarantees and meet those guarantees. It has guarantees it need to meet If they want to screw the consumer and fail to meet its requirements then the consumer has the right/duty to complain, sue, etc. The phone and cable companies cannot just do what they want because they already have the consumer's money.
        • For the most part, SLAs for business lines are regulated by state "department of public utilities" organizations in the US. The rules vary from state to state. In some places, ISDN is regulated so, in some places not.

          In my experience however, no state, nor the federal government, has ever regulated Cable Modem or DSL as a business service. Of course my experience is limited to Kansas, Connecticut and Massachusetts. (I've ended up with business-grade and regulated ISDN lines in each)
          • No SLA, business or residential, is ever going to pay for lost wages. You'll probably get a pro-rated service credit or if you bitch enough, a month of free service. Just rememnber to write down the time of every outage and the trouble ticket number when you call tech support. My friend got a few months of free DSL that way when his GTE DSL went down almost every night when everybody got online. They totally oversold their service and eventually they upgraded.
            Business service isn't any better. If the phones or T1 at the office go down (thankfully not often) no way they'll pay for lost business or lost wages. Service credit is all you'll get. If you're that worried, give yourself an out in your contract so you can be released from the long-term contract and cancel them for shitty service.
            • British Telecom (and I think Pipex too) pay compensation for downtime on "business class" ISDN and ADSL services. And for those who got BT Business ISDN (not the home highway one), the compensation isn't too bad either :-)
    • Considering that residential service in most parts of the US is still controlled by baby-bell monopolies, expecting business service to all customers may not be such an unreasonable demand.

      To make an analogy, imagine that your local cable monopoly decided to offer "improved service" for an additional fee over your current cost. There would be immediate and justifiable complaints.

      Yet it seems okay for the phone company to do this.

      Off course, if there was true competition, there would be no grounds to require the best service for everyone. The market would take care of that itself.
    • If hard-lines are broken, pull out your cell-phone, laptop, adapters...and dial away.
      They is always a way around, you just have to antecipate it.

      -
      • I live in a remote area and used to have power cuts regularly. I've used the cell phone and laptop solution several times (since the network equipment needs power). It's always good to have a backup solution, even if your job doesn't depend on it.

  • They don't compensate for downtime?! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonynnous Coward ( 557984 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:20PM (#3098214)
    You contracted with them to provide service--which is no different between residential and business accounts. If they refuse to provide a credit for an outage, contact the state regulating authority for that particular utility. You may not get a partial refund, but at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you cost them a few bucks in having to respond.

    • Re:They don't compensate for downtime?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by WebSnake ( 563537 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:45PM (#3098318)
      I work for a provider of broadband services. DSL services are the bottom of the barrel. The technology is simply built on top of old technology. There is nothing you can do to prevent downtimes. No provider gaurantees 5 nines 99.999 or anything close for Residential DSL. The increased costs of Business DSL is to cover circuit monitoring and faster response times, many times AT THE EXPENSE OF THE RESIDENTIAL DSL SUBSCRIBERS, so the business class can be brought online again.

      Bottom line - if you are telecommuting, it is a business class - pay for it, and THEN you will get special treatment.

      No matter what, you will ALWAYS have downtime... that is the nature of the Internet. So, if connectivity is so important, bite the bullet and order cable as a second backup provider, or break out the old dialup modem.
    • ok, $50.00/mo typical cost for cable service.

      $50/30days = 1.67/day.

      Most outages are 1 day or less (it is really annoying when you people call after the service is down for 10 mins complaining -- if it is down more than 12 hours, call otherwise, wait, it isn't that important, really.)

      So for $1.67/day I don't consider that exactly what we are talking about here, but I may be wrong. Like I have said before. People are looking for lost wages, etc. They are not looking for 1.67/day.

      • Re:They don't compensate for downtime?! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ZxCv ( 6138 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:03PM (#3098648) Homepage
        Most outages are 1 day or less (it is really annoying when you people call after the service is down for 10 mins complaining -- if it is down more than 12 hours, call otherwise, wait, it isn't that important, really.)

        I've learned 1 thing from having Cox Cable internet service out here in Vegas. And that is, the second the modem goes down, call Cox. The reason being that half of the times my modem has gone down, it has been a fault with my modem or the line to my house or the connection at my street or any other number of things that seem to be relegated to me only. No way am I going to waste basically an entire work day just on the hope that it is a system-wide problem and not just me. I would rather call up and "bother" tech support to make sure I'm not the only one. I've actually run into 3 or 4 techs that gave me the same kind of attitude you gave in your post. Granted, I only pushed hard enough to get 1 of them fired, but that kind of mentality, particularly from people that are supposed to be there to help, is just inexcusable. If people calling up tech support when things aren't working is "really annoying" to you, then perhaps you should look for a different line of work.

  • Your Business should handle this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whois ( 27479 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:21PM (#3098219) Homepage
    If you telecommute, then having business grade service at home is one of the costs of doing business. It may not make sense, but the only reason the phone company charges more for business lines is because of the higher SLA for downtime. Businesses lose money if their phones/data lines don't work, residents are just inconvieninced. Thats the way the phone company looks at it.

    So if you professionally telecommute, the company you work for should consider the type of service you need for the home. Personally, if I plan to telecommute all the time, I request a T1 or frac-T1, not because I need the circuit (DSL is just as good) but because I need the SLA's.

    If I'm just telecommuting part of the time, and have the option of going in to the office, then a regular phone line and DSL is fine for the home, because I have a backup plan for internet access.

    Personally I think this is one more thing "Ask Slashdot" really won't have an answer for. The answer is to "Ask Your Boss" and see what they say.
    • The fixed-wireless company I work for covers a good rural area in our part of the country, which subsequently gives them a lot of telecommuters who wish to access company VPNs (many of which rarely even visit the company offices).

      Because of the strong telecommuting base, the company's "residential" service not only permits telecommuting and other applications that utilize tunnels, encrytion, etc., but treats the home market that uses this product no differently than the business market. You're buying a basic connection - not a business one, home one, school one, etc. Being independent of the legacy incumbant local exchange network, policies and pricing holdovers, I'd expect you're likely to find fixed wireless and other "new" network providers more receptive to approaching residential users without service or quality discrimination.

      When you look at the evolution of business vs. residential service, its origins are in the pre-divestiture tariff world where Ma Bell was forced through regulatory means to charge residential users less. Other than competitive pricing forces, there are no good justifications for giving a home user crappy service or limited functionality just because their office is also their residence.

      I'd recommend that if you're being screwed by your local phone provider, shop around until you find someone competent.

      *scoove*

    • It is not the company's responsibility to pay for this. I think it is entirely appropriate that you pay for your own business line to telecommute. That's a decision you have to make. Businesses do not buy you a car to be able to get to work every day; why should they buy you a business line to telecommute? It would be nice if businesses helped provide you with internet connectivity, but I wouldn't be upset if they did not.
      • Why the heck not? If you work in the office, the business has to pay for office space, parking, restrooms, water, electricity, heating, air conditioning, etc. If you're not working in the office, then they don't have to pay for these things, why shouldn't they pay for the bandwidth for you to do your job? Maybe they shouldn't pay for the whole cost, but I think at least a partial reimbursement would be appropriate.
    • "Ask Your Boss" is absolutely the right answer. I have been telecommuting for three and a half years now, after working in the office for four (long enough to be the secondmost senior developer). When I first moved a hundred miles from the home office, my boss offered to let me telecommute. Three years later, when I moved a thousand miles away, I asked if he wanted to continue the arrangement, and he agreed.

      He pays for the second phone line and the internet connection, period. I send him all the (paid) receipts, and he deducts it as a business expense. If I was suffering the kind of downtime you were, I would be pushing my boss to pay for the business class line. If I did have a significant downtime, we could overnight mass storage media (CDROM, Jaz disk, whatever you've got) so that I always had work to do. Never say "I can't do work" (and eat into your vacation time!) just because your connection is down. Let your boss make the business decision whether the frequent overnighting is more expensive then the line upgrade.

      I know telecommuting is a sweet deal for those of us with the discipline for it, but if you (or I) become a liability rather than an asset, you can be fired just like anyone else. But the extra bucks a month is probably less than last year's raise.

      ---------

      Please don't reply about my sig; I'm a recovering math teacher, and I picked the numbers to make the answer come out to less than a minute!

    • Your company is not likely to pay for a T1 or FT1 to the Internet - this can easily run into $300, $700, or more a month by the time all is said and done.

      On the other hand, your company is quite likely to pay $100 a month for two residential connections using different technologies and supported by different vendors. In my neighborhood DSL and wireless are good options, in yours it might be DSL and cable or some other combination of choices.

      .
      • LEt's take the "average" IT position that would justify telecommuting. We're talking a $60k+ a year employee. After adding in payroll taxes, benefits, marginal costs of office space and equipment, etc., this employee costs the company approximately $90-$100k/year. We're talking over $8000/month.

        In all honestly, most employers shouldn't freak that telecommuting costs $500/month. However, it IS reasonable to have the telecommuter's salary be less IF (and this is a BIG if) the costs of the connection is greater than the overhead of them being at the office.

        If your employer really feels that $100-$300/mo for a business class DSL or $500 for a fractional T1 is too much money, you might want to crunch the numbers with them.

        Alex

  • Get a business line. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkwiz ( 114416 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:22PM (#3098224)
    You are using it for business. If you want the kind of service you'd expect for business purposes, you should pay for it.

    I'm sure this is going against the grain of some here, who'd say that we should have perfect service on our cheap lines, or that you shouldn't have to pay additional for better service (customer service, not bandwidth). That is ridiculous. If everyone were to be prioritized the same, costs would increase (need more techs to handle faster response times) and your price would increase proportionately.

    Shit happens, wear a helmet.
    • I'm paying the extra for 'business' dsl, which, aside from having a static /29, is the same as residential rates -- when my DSL went down at 4:30pm on a Friday, I was told the soonest a technician could look into it was Monday. Huh? If my business depends on my connectivity, I can't wait that time. Business lines are just a way to soak the customers for extra money, they won't help your service.
      • If your connection went down at the end of Friday and they promised someone out Monday, that's within a 24-*business*-hour time window.

        That's perfectly acceptable in today's world, whether it is with you personally or not. That's the exact guarantee most business providers will give you -- 24 business hours, even if a truck roll is required.

        This has nothing to do with "Evil Cable / Teleco". This is because the world in general has not transitioned over completely to the idea that business is a 7-day-a-week thing anymore, and not just "open Mon through Fri". You're going to have to convince the world in general to accept this before anything can be done in this regard... because 90% of the time Business means Monday-through-Friday. That's why we still call them the Business Days...

        -- Primis.

  • I have some advice.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rnicey ( 315158 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:22PM (#3098226) Homepage
    Get it installed as a business. You get what you pay for and typically it's good value. Especially when you're screaming at the wall because your residential DSL line just went down and you've got 2 minutes left to make a wire transfer.

    High availability always costs a lot more cash. The closer to 100% you want to get, it takes exponentially more cash and resources. The phone companies understand this, which is why they rightly have no sympathy for you trying to skim a few bucks every month.

  • simple (Score:3, Funny)

    by flynt ( 248848 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:22PM (#3098227)
    "How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work? "

    Simple, I read a good book or spend time with my friends. Seriously, this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school because it is too icy out or something.

    • this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school...

      Exactly. Why shouldn't telecom outages be treated like a sick day? People take sick days and life goes on. People get stuck in traffic on the way to work or the commuter train breaks down. My crummy home ADSL service is plenty more reliable than the expressway at rush hour.

      It's a case of expectations always exceeding the improvements in the technology. The theory behind telecommuting is that people who work at home are more productive than people who commute. That extra productivity should more than make up for occasional downtime.

  • I don't really see the big problem. (Score:5, Funny)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:23PM (#3098232) Homepage
    It depends on what your work is, of course, but I would simply make sure that I can get work done even with a net outage. Mirror essential documents or code pieces locally, and you can get something done anyway. There is always documentation to write, proposals to tinker with or reading to catch up on. And if you need to talk to a colleague, there's always still the telephone...

    /Janne

  • wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:23PM (#3098233) Journal
    How is this becomming 'blurred?' If you want guarenteed uptime, you pay for guarenteed uptime. You don't start whining and begging for it after the fact. If you're telecommuting, then it's your responsibility and your company's responsibility to sit down beforehand, and work out policies about this sort of thing, and other such issues. Do they supply you with a company machine? What do you do in the event of hardware failure? How do you handle software updates? Who pays for connectivity? What do you do if it fails? Do you have redundant connections?
  • I can imagine a phone company saying "If you want busines grade service, you need to pay for it"

    Maybe as a perk of telecommuting, the company could pay for a business line, or negotiate a special deal if it has a bunch of folks telecommuitng. Then the support would really be there, at least I would hope so. (heh ... right)

    Home businesses would be in a different class.

  • If the phone company is the problem... (Score:4, Informative)

    by mike_the_kid ( 58164 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:27PM (#3098245) Journal
    then cut the phone company out of the loop as much as possible. Granted, its still their copper, but there is no way around that until its their fiber, or however it turns out.

    My point is this: The phone company is pretty good at phones, not so good at being an ISP. I am in a Mid-Atlantic city, and there are a few choices for DSL. Basically, figure out who the trunc provider is for the ISPs, shop around. If you need business class DSL, do not try to limp by on residential. If you go to the right ISP, you might be able to negotiate your own terms of service.

    You won't negotiate with the phone company, it really does not make sense for either party involved. Find yourself an ISP that offers SDSL for residential. Ask them for references to current customers. Check up on things. If its worth it to you, upgrade to business class. Its going to be more expensive per bandwidth, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

    There are a lot of ISP's that can't afford James Earl Jones advertisements, can't afford to spam you with free cd's. There are a lot of them that consist of one or two people. If that one person is good, you're set. So do your homework, shop around, and leave phone service to the phone company.
    • There are a lot of ISP's that can't afford James Earl Jones advertisements, can't afford to spam you with free cd's. There are a lot of them that consist of one or two people. If that one person is good, you're set. So do your homework, shop around, and leave phone service to the phone company.

      I have to agree. I'm living in Vancouver, BC, and my dad is living in Toronto, Ontario. Let me try to be politic by saying that he is somewhat "technically challenged". When he first signed up for Internet connectivity, he called one of the baby bells and they proceded to do a good job of screwing up and causing a bunch of stress... for EVERYONE involved! (Believe me, there's a REASON why I moved halfway across the country, and I feel for the tech support guy)

      All in all, dad was pretty turned off of this whole Internet thing because it wasn't working right, and I was getting a little frustrated being his tech support from across the country.

      I proceded to make some calls and do some research, and came across a couple of small "mom and pop" type shops. I found one that was the consumate "local store" ISP. I explained the fact that my dad was "high maintenance" and "technically challenged", and they laughed and said "no problem". I got a good feeling from them, both socially and technically, and dad went ahead and switched over. The new ISP actually handled the switch-over for him. Things went well, and dad's on-line with the best of them.

      Now when he's got a technical question or problem he calls them and they know him by name, seem to go out of their way to help him out, and everyone is happy. Dad's probably one of their best marketting tools, and he even helped them buy their last house (he's a real estate broker).

      It's pretty refreshing to think that not all technology delivered to the masses has to be provided by some large corporate entity that treats you like crap, and that the "little guy" still has a place. If anything, I think there's a bigger need for the "little guy" now more than ever.

  • You answered your own question (Score:4, Funny)

    by batkiwi ( 137781 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:28PM (#3098251)
    You have a RESIDENTIAL line. They're not going to sue you/disconnect you/etc for using it for some business purposes, but there are no guarantees.

    I'm sure they will gladly refund the % of your montly bill for your downtime, but other than that, don't expect anything.

    Want to know why a business line is 120$ for a base line when a residential one is 25$? Service expectations and guarantees.

    Your residential line is for your convenience. That's why it's cheap. You don't pay much, and you don't expect much.

    A business line is expensive. You pay a lot, you expect a lot.

    Heh, if slashdot was an auto/truck site:
    "I use my mazda sport-truck to haul three tons of gravel 5 days a week. I don't want to buy a utility truck, it's too expensive, but mazda said my warranty didn't cover the drivetrain breakdown! What's wrong with them!"

  • Prepare for Disconnections (Score:5, Insightful)

    by in.johnnyd ( 534394 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:32PM (#3098270) Homepage
    I primarily use a broadband based VPN, but have dial-up access as my backup.

    If my company's VPN/remote access servers are unavailable, I keep a list of "offline" work to do that helps kill time. This usually means reading PDFs that I've downloaded, or writing emails (to be sent once I can get back online), or anything else that doesn't require connectivity.

    It helps to replicate/mirror my company's internal resources too (web sites, files on file servers, databases). You need a big hard drive, but it beats the hard drive into the office (ugh... bad I know, but it's saturday).

  • Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rabidfox ( 563536 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:33PM (#3098274)
    I work for a major ISP and I here this every day. If you're out of service for 3 days, we'll give you the couple dollars for the time out of service, but there's no way in hell we'll reimburse you for the lost business time. You want to do business and have a %100 reliable connection? Two words: Frame Relay. If you don't want to shell out the cash, be happy with the near T1 speeds you get for $35/month. Your business transactions on the 'net are just important to us as the 85/yrold lady trying to get a picture of her grand-daughter's puppy. Tough luck.

  • This is very similar to the problems I had back when everything was based on a mainframe and terminals. What do you do when THE computer is down? Here's some ideas that worked, then, and some others that I've found helpful, now.

    • Blame it on the computer. :^) If something needs to be done on the computer, and it's not running, then there's not much I can do about it.
    • Ask for help. See if your employer can bring some additional pressure to bear on the [phone] company.
    • Do off-line work. I'd do the stuff that kept getting put off until "later".
    • Go to the library, internet cafe, Starbucks, Kinko's, or any place else you can think of which has internet access available.
    • Get a business line and ask your company to pay for it. I know, residential rates are cheaper, but if it's being used for a business purpose, and you NEED it to be there, then it's a cost of doing business. Let your employer make the choice, AND BEAR THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT DECISION. If they want to do it on the cheap, no guarantees; if they are willing to pay for the business line, then uptime assurances will be much better.
    • Get a second means of internet access (satellite, cable, dsl, dial-up). It may not be ideal, but some connectivity is better than none. Again, get them to agree to pay for it in advance.
    • Work locally. Make phone calls (using 2nd line) and instead of entering data into computer forms, write it down on a piece of paper. Key it in later.

    So far as I know, Murphy's Law has not yet been repealed. Expect things to go wrong. Come up with contingencies. Do what you can. (And if you can't do anything, take a vacation and make the most of it!)

    If you are not already telecommuting, and are thinking of starting, be sure to discuss these issues with your employer BEFORE YOU START!

  • If you are telecommuting and you need connectivity I suggest you get a business line. Unfortunately the phone company is in order, as residential is supposed to be used for 'pleasure' or personal.

    The fact is that if you do use it for business and the phone company finds out they can cut you off or potentially block the service. I think on slashdot here there was a case where some ISP was cutting off its residential uses from using vpn. Most probably wont do that as they don't care. It is not worth their time to monitor what you are doing unless you start causing problems in their network. Then it is abuse.

    Most decent ISP, like Earthlink/Mindspring would compensate you by refunding you the amount of time that you were down. So if you were down for 3 days they would deduct it from your next bill. Rather than you paying $50 one month you'd pay about $48 (I'm sure someone here will do the exact math). They would not compensate you for lost time at work.

    Were you to get a business line then they would have to keep you up 24/7 else you could sue them for lost business income. I have seen this happen before and there is little you can do. However if you want to persue this read your Terms of Service and see if it mentions anything about this. It probably says 'your screwed if you....'

  • While the easy solution is that employers should cover the expense of a business-class line, it doesn't seem that simple.

    A business class DSL line is sufficient bandwidth for a small to mid sized office -- and many offices use just this. Managers are not likely to justify spending the cost equivalent to an entire office's connectivity on one employee. (Or worse, every telecommuting employees). In this case, managers will find that telecommuting is not saving them any money over the alternative.

    A commuter-class line (as suggested in the first post in this thread) would be ideal for such a situation, but they just don't exist yet. In the mean time, I'd suggest that you find a provider who will offer a dialup until your connestion is provisioned.

    -j-turkey

  • Not so blurred (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chrysrobyn ( 106763 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @02:52PM (#3098347)
    The line isn't as blurred as you like. Telecommuting with a residential account will get you residential class uptime, bandwidth and latency. You get what you pay for. You probably chose residential because it's cheaper, and you now know why it's cheaper. If you want accountability, uptime, gaurantees, get a business class line and pay for it. Not to say that I don't think it sucks -- I do. Reliability above 95% is hard, and it costs someone.

  • phone agreement (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pinqkandi ( 189618 )
    I'd look at your phone subscriptions terms. If there's nothing about no compensation on resedential lines, it may be worth taking your phone company to small claims court. though, i'd first recommend reading my next paragraph.

    also, multiple letters and phone calls to them may get something done. while it isn't the phone company, i once had several hundred dollars of small electrical stuff (lamps 'n' such - stuff they do not recommend putting surge protectors on) destroyed by an enormous by an enormous power surge (which was a big blunder on there fault, and should have known there work was going to do it). eventually, a high up suit and tie worker called me, and reimbursed the full amount of destroyed items. while that obviously not the same situation as yours, it's worth a shot using the same tactics.

  • First off, I have local mirrors of the code I work on. Anything goes down, I can still work disconnected. 'Yall use version control, right? You can easily integrate a fork between your own work-for-a-day and everything else, right?

    Additionally, my employer has a phone bank to allow folks to dial in in emergencies. It's long distance from here so I rarely use it, but if you *really* *really* need to get that expense report in the email or grab a copy of that code you were working on, it's darned nifty to have.

    Second, as everyone else says -- if you want high reliability, get your company to pay for a business-class line.
  • You agreed to it when you signed up for your bandwidth. Are they violating that?

    Now... also.

    If you are telecommuting for real (you aren't working for yourself).. your employer should be paying for the bandwidth.

    As for downtime.. if the downtime is so important, get multiple connections.

    • I work for an ISP. We only advertize for residential use, our contract states that we are only for residential use. However, we allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with the connection. If you want to use our connection to run a company, that's fine by us. BUT, our contract states that we guarantee NOTHING. If your service goes out, we will give you a proportional credit for the downtime. Nothing more. This is the reality of using residential connections for business use. We don't even guarantee any specific speed, just a 384 minimum download (our sales people seem to think otherwise, though.) Heck, the phone companys we contract through (national DSL) don't guarantee ANY speed. As long as you have a connection, most telcos won't even troubleshoot line issues for us. In fact, with some ISPs, if you tell them you're using their residential account for business use, they'll either start charging you a business rate, or they'll just cancel your account (Comcast, anyone?)

      If you plan on running a business, or making money in any way off of your internet connection, purchase something that is designed for businesses, and is guaranteed. When you call your residential ISP and complain that you are losing thousands of dollars (or, my personal favorite "I had to send my five employees home without pay today, and they have kids to feed!") you're not going to get any sympathy. We sell to home users, and it's not our fault that you weren't wise enough to choose a guaranteed business connection to risk your income on.

      Ask any residential ISP technician, you'll get the exact same attitude I just gave you. Yes, we are more than willing to try to help you, but if you whine and yell about the fact that the connection has been down for "two whole hours!" then don't expect us to sympathize. Getting mad at the residential technicians isn't going to help a thing. If anything, if you get a particularly bad or mean technician, he'll just blow you off for your attitude. (I always try to remain polite and professional, and always TRY to help as best I can, but some techs will just blow off annoying customers.)

      And, yes, I have been responsible for a business' internet connection. Thank god the CEO listened and was willing to pay for a T1, rather than DSL...
  • I telecommute every day. Downtime, for me, is not acceptable. I do DBA work and am on call for system engineer stuff. And, of course, if my DSL is going to fail it's going to do so right after I check in a broken stored procedure or right when the SQL server blue-screens.

    So I've got enhanced residential DSL *and* a cable modem *and* a regular phone line and modem *and* a CDPD wireless modem (primarily used for travel, but also good for a backup).

    I also have a backup installation of the tools I need at a friend's house who is on a different DSL provider.

    If downtime is a problem, it's your responsibility to avoid it. The phone company, in this case, is absolutely right. You're paying for "gee, maybe I'll surf the net every now and then" and expecting five nines uptime.

    Cheers
    -b

  • Backup, backup, backup (Score:2, Insightful)

    by aleph+ ( 99924 )
    The only way to have a reliable anything is to make sure that you have a backup setup and ready to go. In the case of connectivity, if your main link is DSL you should have a backup dial-up connection. Preferably it should be with a different ISP, and would be even better with a different backbone provider. Test the dial-out. If you have two phone lines, make sure that you can dial-out on the non-DSL line, in case your first phone line gets disconnected. Make sure you can still get your email, and get to the servers using the dial-up.

    DSL is still a relatively unreliable technology. People who need reliable remote connectivity still often use ISDN for that reason -- it may be be a bitch to set up, but once it's working it doesn't tend to flake out on you like DSL. Dial up may not be as nice as DSL, but its a heck of a lot better than nothing.

  • bah (Score:2)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )
    It is very, very, very difficult to feel sympathy for anyone who gets to telecommute.
  • I have been telecommuting for over three years. Forget the advice you are getting here, most of it is wrong. Even with a T1 or better you are not going to get any type of lost time guarantee. The absolute best deal I have seen is some percentage of line cost returned after an extended (as defined by the contract) outage.

    Every deal is unique and residential customers are so far down the line as to be without any hope(I have dealt with Bell Atlantic, Verizon, and Bell South). My favorite comment was from the Bell South rep who, when I could only connect to the office at 13k, told me that they only guarantee 9600 baud on a residential phone line and anything better was just lucky. (It relates back to fax machines of all things.)

    While that was a residential line, a business less promises faster service, rarely anything else. If you are a large company, you get very fast service and little downtime because of a service level agreement(SLA) and the ability to backbone with other choices. As a single telecommuter, you have no clout and most local service has no alternate carrier so they know you cannot leave. Feel free to write to the public utilities commission or whatever your state supports. They will tell you that under the connection agreement, there is nothing they can do.

    Yes - it sucks. No - it's not fair. As the attorney for Verizon told me - they don't care. Tough to argue when they are willing to admit they could care less about what you like or don't. You could always try a two way satellite link. But that will cost you about $80/month to use as a backup and VPN is a real issue.
  • By compensation are you talking about something beyond a prorated reimbursement of what they charged you for the service that wasn't working?


    I dealt with phone company issues for a past employer, and there is no way they would have provided compensation for downtime even for a business. Anything beyond a regular phone line you probably signed something for anyway, and it surely had all kinds of liability waivers. As for the phone lines, you could possibly get a credit for service not received, but I think the best you could do is complain to the FCC and maybe they'll fine the company for not taking action quickly enough.

  • Alternatives & Plannning Ahead (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @03:23PM (#3098477) Homepage Journal
    1. Buy appropriate grades of products and services.
      What part of "Residential Service" didn't you understand? How about how it differs from "Business Service"? If you want the better service you have to pay for it; going the cheapie route then complaining that you got what you paid for seems particularly inane. This is true for phone services, office products, whatever.

    2. Always avoid a single point of failure.
      In this case apparently your phone line. Get cell phone service, get DSL or Broadband, invest in a VOIP service (heck the chat clients are building them in as fast as possible.) If you depend on a fax machine get two or set up your PC as a backup.

    3. Have a backup plan.
      If you can't work from home then head off to a place that rents PCs by the hour (Kinko's are everywhere.) Or invest in a laptop and check into a local hotel with 'net connections for the day. Or get time at one of the shared business offices that have sprung up in many places (basically they supply the shared infrastructure and you pay rent.) Or head down to the local public library or friend's house. Don't wait for the problem to happen but be proactive and make contingency plans.
    Look, if you're going to work from home, particularly primarily from home, then you've got to stop treating your home office as an extension of your home life and instead view it as a branch office of your employer. Telling your boss that you couldn't get work done because the printer broke down or the phone was out or you kid's latest computer game ate your PC just won't cut it.

    You're competing against folks working in the big office and need to meet those same levels of performance and reliability. You're already two strikes behind by not being around in person, able to chat around the cooler, open to having an on-the-spot impromptu meeting convened in the hallway. Don't make it any worse by forcing folks to jump through yet more hoops to get in touch with you, calling in with (possibly perfectly true but still unacceptable) "The dog ate it" reasons why you were unable to perform your job.

    Sit down and list out what you need in order to work effectively. Now go through each item and determine what you'll do if that items fails, what alternatives you can put in place now. Whatever you do the least disruptive to how everyone else works with you is the best.

    This may mean investing in a laptop. It definitely means putting a good backup (and restore!) strategy in place. It also probably calls for having some second-string hardware in case the primary fails; things like printers, fax machines, network hubs & routers, etc. Obviously phone and network connections are important so you need to arrange for alternates and make sure your co-workers know them, the company address book lists primary and backup, etc.

    If you don't start treating your working at home as WORK and not just as a long day off from the office, doing what can be done from home trust me, you won't succeed. Today it was the phone, tomorrow your ISP, the next day something will fry on you. As far as you employer is concerned, as nice as they may be about it, each is an unexpected day when you disrupted plans by being unavailable and/or unproductive.

    • Thanks for the well-thought-out suggestions. I was as equally unprepared for this as my company was, apparently. While we are a worldwide company (which means we have a remote reporting structure already in place), we don't have many programmers working from home. This is new for me and for them. I wasn't really posting to gripe as much as I was posting to get some honest suggestions (some people have been pretty unforgiving in their responses ;) )

      I'm 2 months into this arrangement, and I'd like to make the necessary changes to my service sooner, rather than later. I had not considered the cost implications that some other posters mentioned, either...I had initially discounted the additional cost of a business line in my home, but I hadn't considered the additional costs that my company is saving by my *not* occupying an office in NYC.

      I do have redundant access (business class DSL and dialup), but both are dependant upon the telephone lines (residential class for now). Satellite is a solution that will not work for me due to my townhome association's rules about external structures on the home. Cable is not offered in my area...although I had been told that it was by the cable company. They apparently offer it in my town, but not on all streets in my town. I will be investigating upgrading my telephone line to business class next week. I initially didn't believe the difference in service would be significant enough to warrant the extra cost. Some posters seem to agree with that, but I will upgrade nonetheless.

      (And, just some more background on the issue that I didn't feel was relevant to my submission to Ask Slashdot: I was dealing with my telephone company's complete incompetence and inability to escalate repetitive problems internally. They kept on sending the same moronic installation guy out and he kept on saying that he couldn't find our house...which is, of course, right on the street and well-marked. And of course every time he tried to find the house, he never picked up a phone and called my cell# (which I made sure they had on record after the first failed attempt). Everytime they missed an appointment, they told me I would have to wait 3 days to get another installation dude out here b/c of company policy...that there was no way they could speed it up...this happened 3 or 4 times. In Jersey, they have laws protecting consumers from that type of behavior. MN has no such laws. (It only resulted in downtime once...the day after I had checked out of that local hotel you suggested but was expecting to have service.))

      I don't think I was quite as clueless as I may have sounded in my submission...but in the areas that I was clueless, I have been more than adequately clued in. Thanks!
      • I do have redundant access (business class DSL and dialup), but both are dependant upon the telephone lines (residential class for now).
        Use your cell phone. Or if it doesn't support a data connection get one that does and cough up the outrageous sum for the silly little custom cable to plug in your PC. While it's not the fastest connection in the world (next year, next year) it's enough to handle web surfing, remote log-in, email with attachments (particularly if you don't pull all your email down directly but selectively browse it.)

        Also as I noted there's also simply decamping to someplace that does have service and setting up shop there. Kinko's already has keyboards, mice and monitors just lug your PC case in with you. Consider that $10/hour a solid investment in your career; you're undoubtedly still making a good wage on top of that temporary hourly expense. Or talk to a local hotel about a day rate, 9-5. Most are perfectly happy to let you use a room with a desk & a dataport over the afternoon for a much reduced rate. This is especially true if you make it clear the room won't be requiring bed service or anything to make it ready for a reserved customer at 5:05pm.

        Sorry that you had to learn the hard way but like I said, you're now a branch office of your employer and need to start looking at everything with that attitude. Printer - no $59 rickety deal but a real one with a serious duty cycle, or at least two of the disposable ones for when the first blows smoke and you're on a deadline. Same for every other piece of hardware - they WILL melt down after every Radio Shack has closed for the night and you gotta get something out ASAP.

        You're now Administrative Services, IS Field Support, Security Dept. and of course Facilities Management. All of those things you took for granted in the glass box are now your responsibility: Phones, phone-operator, fax, photocopier, filing, supplies, backups, library, librarian, mail, overnight mail, office accounting, and of course morale. You're working without a net, supply room, or those ubiquitous folks who kept everything running; that's now you.

        Its a biiig transition and one lots of folks simply don't make properly. They look at what works for them on a few days home from the office and say "Hey, I could do this all of the time" and dive in. As you're learning (& folks who read this) its a whole lot more then that. I've seen any number of good folks go down in flames after they botched the transition to working at home.

        Consider taking what you've learned doing it and what you've picked up here and bring it back to your employer; turn this negative experience it into a plus and use it to your advantage. See if corporate is willing to set up a "support group" for those who are working remotely. A message board where folks can share tips on what has worked for them, lessons learned, etc. is invaluable and is a great resource for management to get a feel for what needs to be improved, what positions and personalities succeed at this and which don't.

        BTW best investments? Get a quality cell phone that supports a headset, also a home phone that does too (I'm fond of the Siemens 4200 series) and then pick out headsets that really work for you, sound good, invest in them. Also strangely enough a webcam - not necessarily for real-time interaction but to pop a face-shot into your emails occasionally, say with a picture what would take a 1MB words, remind folks what you look like and that you're a real person out there. If you're on Wintel learn how to use Application Sharing (built into Netmeeting & XP) or on any platform shared whiteboarding, it will be invaluable at some point.

        Finally, make a few buddies who are also working from home and plug into that network around you. No office mates is isolating and the feedback and camaraderie of some lunch & coffee pals becomes invaluable. If nothing else it gives you a reason to dress up and leave the house in the daytime occasionally to do more then shop or run to the Post Office. Oh, and sit on a phone meeting in the nude once in awhile just to amuse yourself (but that's it!)

      • Talk to the local polititions. the phone company is a monopoly in MN, but you can let them know you are dissatisfied. In fact if they miss an appointment because THEY are unable to find your house, then you should call the PUC (Public Utilities Commission, but name might be slightly different) ASAP and complain. You don't have power yourself, but they do, and you pay them.

        Tellecommuting is becomeing more common. Residential phone service just went up a notch in importance to the local ecconomy, and the phone company is gonna have to learn to deal with it. When a storm goes through and I don't have service for a week while they put the lines back up, I can live with that. But downtime that isn't related to a storm is not acceptable. A backhoe can take out one line, but it can be fixed in hours.

  • 1. Cable Modem
    2. ISDN to a different ISP
    3. Analog Dialup to Company Network
    4. GPRS or GSM dialup

    Obviously, my company pays for all of them. The point is: if Internet access is important, have at least one backup, if not more.

    -- PhoneBoy

  • Won't happen. (Score:3, Informative)

    by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <jason.nashNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:00PM (#3098629)
    Read the SLAs on business circuits. The telcos do NOT reimburse for lost revenue or productivity. You get back credit on your bill for your outage. That's it. If our T1s at work go down for more than like an hour we get back a day's credit off the bill. We don't get back money lost due to loss of communications. You won't either. That's just part of doing business like this.
  • I work tech support for a cable modem provider from my home.
    When the option to telecommute became available, Although I had a residential cable modem in my home, my employer provided a seperate "business" cable modem (same stuff, different account), as well as a business phone line,a workstation, a desk and chair.

    Although uptime is not a regular issue, when I do need to call in for loss of connectivity, the business folks are harder to get ahold of than the residential folks. This is simply because the residential service has Hundreds of TSR's while the business folks end up having me leave a message and call me back. The business tech support people at least know wht a VPN is and can resolve issues quickly.

    The main reason for the business account (in my lower level employee understanding)is the VPN connection which is against the AUP of the residential service. A VPN connection will use LOTS more bandwidth than a regular residentail web surfer.

    with new file sharing apps and people who constantly share hundreds of files over thier residential connection, VPN bandwidth usage is not the big issue it used to be. Although lots of people run VPN over their residential line, larger usage comes from folks who keep a connection open to a file sharing network or run servers or host websites.

    All in all, if I can't connect from home, I drive 20 minutes and work from the office but have only had to do this once in 2 years.

    I may be partial, but, get a cable modem if you can, and use the phone line as a backup.

  • Residential vs. Business. (Score:3)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:04PM (#3098658) Homepage
    Residential phone lines, and therefore dsl, isdn, and whatever other services they offer, are for RESIDENTIAL use. That typically means for home entertainment purposes and not as a high availability critical business resource. This means occasionally it might go down, or bandwidth might be limited. This means they might restrict your monthly bandwidth consumption, or restrict your use of servers. If you rely on this for your business needs, then you need to pay for guaranteed uptime or at the very least get yourself an alternative internet connection. If its REALLY that important, then thats just the sacrifice you have to make.

    -Restil

  • Contact your local PUC! (Score:3, Informative)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:17PM (#3098706)
    The Incumbent (Incompetent?) Local Exchange Carriers are regulated monopolies. Their ability to get new tariffs are dependent on your state Public Utilities Commission. If you have a problem with lousy service - write a letter of complaint to you PUC, copy the local phone company - you might actually get action. Unfortunately, the ILEC's view local phone service as a cash cow. They've been cutting back on customer service staff, technicians, and maintenance in order to lower expenses and raise profits. Consolidation of the industry has only accelerated this trend. Don't look for things to get any better any time soon, as the industry has already bought congress (*cough* Tauzin-Dingel bill).

  • Pacific Bell lost a class action suit on this. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:34PM (#3098775) Journal
    Paul Shames instituted a class action suit against Pac Bell and SBC Internet (along with "DOES 1 through 100, which I take to be the instalation subcontractors) and won it. Payoff was (essentially) a $50 credit on the bill or a check for $20 if service had since been canceled if the installer didn't arrive in the 4-hour window.

    Superior Court of San Diego County CA, Case No. GIC 751342.

    That should give you a measure of what to ask for as a bill credit: $50 per extra halfday.

    I'd send them a nice letter offering to waive any claim against them for your losses due to their delays, in return for a $50 bill credit for every extra halfday that they cost you due to install screwups, provided the credit appears on one of your next two bills, and referring to the case number as an example of what might happen if they don't agree.

    Though the case doesn't refer to you in particular (and the claim opportunity has timed out anyhow), they might give you the credit rather than risking you might be mad enough to start another class action covering your area and time window, and thus cost them a lot more.
  • Simple and straight foward. But it is easier to ask slashdot and have others do your thinking for you ?? My sdsl thru covad is considered business critical, costs 139.00 for 384/384 but is up or I get payed(the company that is).

  • Fix it yourself (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lanner ( 107308 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @05:26PM (#3098938)

    I live in Littleton Colorado, hopefully soon moving to Orlando Florida. I ordered a 640Kbps bidirectional ADSL line with Qwest Communications in August of 2001. Qwest is based here in Denver. I have noticed that AT&T has a serious strangle hold here for internet cable access, and in their home city, it almost looks like Qwest is loosing that battle. After speaking with other Denver residents, I can understand why.

    I am off the Kipling and Ken Carl CO, about 17,000 feet away. My DSL line sits with about a 21.5bD signal to noise ratio and has not been offline since sometime in early November -- not for a second.

    Before that though, the line was horrendous. The line would randomly loose quality, with a dropping SNR to about 4.5, and the line would randomly retrain because of complete signal loss.

    I am a network engineer for a living, and so I have half a clue. I have no bridge taps, and the symptoms pointed more to something like noise injection or a loose wire punch.

    I called Qwest, and three different times a technician was sent out. My line runs me about $140 every month at these speeds, with a /29 network block, which is rape. Anyway, three times they found nothing. They tested from the apartment complex wiring block (Qwest facing side) to their CO and everything was great! They then left and told me that it was my problem.

    Some time in early November, I got tired of this and begged the apartment staff to let me into the phone room. I convinced them that I knew what I was doing and got in. This complex is absolutely new -- me being one of the first dozen residents. That wiring closet was a mess. I had to tone my line from my apartment to figure out which line was being used, and when I did, I found a loose punch facing towards my apartment. The Qwest technicians never bothered to even look. The thing was making intermittent contact and had been punched badly. I cut the line, stripped it, and repunched it. No more problems.

    When the phone company is incompetent, do it yourself. In my experience, if the line works at all and still has problems, it is usually close to the customer prem, unless it is a bad line card or patch panel or something at the CO. In any event, the people at the CO usually have a clue. Outside of that though, you are talking to paid monkeys who know nothing.

    Do not ask what they can do for you, break in to the wiring closet and do it yourself. Just do not screw up your neighbor's line.

  • Business class service is just an excuse to charge more. I'm not being flip- it's the truth. ISPs know that certain users will pay more, so they create a separate product class for that type of user. The latest crackdowns on home servers, alternate OSes, and routers are part of this strategy. They want that $100-200 that's going to Linksys. They want to cash in on enthusiasts with multiple PCs. But mostly, they know a business user who needs remote access to his home machine can probably be squeezed for a few more $$$ a month, and over the years, this really adds up.

    The bottom line is, how important is this service to you, and how much are you willing to pay? ISPs have armies of MBAs working on this, and they have a pretty good idea.

    How do I know this? I used to work in the marketing dept. of a major regional ISP, which was bought by a national one. We had endless meetings about different types of users, and how much per month they were each "good" for, usually in light of their other options (competition).

    Ultimately, prices are set by the market. The market doesn't care what your costs are. You have little control over what you can charge. Your only leverage is blather and bullshit, which people will either buy, or they won't. If you can keep your costs low enough make a profit at a certain price point, great. If not, well, that's the gamble of being in business.

    Now, of course it might cost more to provide a more reliable line. But whether or not higher reliablity is actually being provided for that higher price is arguable. In most cases it's not- the business service just costs more, and has just as many problems as the "consumer" service. Look at the systems, and the nature of outages- it's all the same network, and you're all on the same local loops. It's not like they're going to build you your own, special network for an extra $10, $20, or $50 a month.

    So use your head, don't take their crap. If they're promising higher reliability, get it in writing. And read the fime print... it's usually full of weasel phrases!

  • Look into Fractional T1 (This isn't crazy...) (Score:5, Informative)

    by John Murdoch ( 102085 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @05:47PM (#3099004) Homepage Journal

    The explosive growth of DSL has created an interesting regulatory loophole that you might be able to take advantage of. In order to provide xDSL service, providers have to co-locate equipment in your local CO. Which is to say, they have to establish a point of presence (POP) there.

    T1 circuits can be expensive--but check into how the circuits are priced. Verizon, for instance, prices the "local loop" (from you to the CO) at a flat $120 per month. If your ISP already has a POP in the local CO, you can actually get a T1 circuit to that POP for $120 per month, plus the ISP's markup. (In my case, using ChoiceOne Communications [choiceonecom.com] I pay $180/month.) You then pay the ISP's fee for bandwidth and Internet connection.

    Doing it this way costs a bit more than a DSL connection. (Okay--quite a bit more: roughly $275/month for a 256k connection, slightly less than $400/month for a 512k connection.) But there are several substantial advantages:

    • Reliability: The legendary "five 9s" of reliability are yours. These circuits get nailed up and stay up.
    • Distance: Your distance from the CO is no longer a problem. I'm 26,000 feet from my CO--literally the last line in this area code for Verizon. They run a line of poles through a state park to get to us, and the Verizon techs view us as easily their most remote T1 customer.
    • Bandwidth: you're paying for a specified bandwidth--but that's enforced at the ISP's router at the POP/CO; typically they'll just open the entire T1 bandwidth from you to the CO. And the ISP will usually configure the router to guarantee that service level, but give you more if it is available. In my experience there is always more available.

    Life is not perfect: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms, and we do see circuit problems when there is heavy lightning. But we've made sure that there is a fresh pot of coffee when the Verizon techs come, and that sort of thing, so they've left a spare Smart Card (the client-side device for the T1 circuit) here--when the electrical storm fries the Smart Card I just swap in a new one, place a service call, and send somebody into town to buy doughnuts. The techs will be by presently.

    There are a lot of benefits to living in rural America--but there are tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that you will probably have to pay a bit more to connect, and you'll have to assume more responsibility for connecting. When that frustrates you, remember: you're no longer in New Jersey.

    John Murdoch

    • Of course the basic question is: Why?

      The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to /. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?

      For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.

      Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.

      It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that .99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for) but lets step back, take a deep breath, and ask if that is really a solution most folks are gonna gave a damn about? Would the average, or even many exceptional long-distance telecommuters require that speed and guarenteed uptime? Aren't there a lot of much more cost effective solution for most folks needs?

      I dunno know about your needs but between dial-up, DSL or Broadband, and a backup cellphone connection I think most everyone could rough it out and keep productive while their primary service is out, all a lot cheaper then your solution.

      IMHO

      • The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to /. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?

        For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.

        Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.

        With respect, I disagree. I am spending that kind of money, for that kind of bandwidth. For a couple of reasons:

        • Distance: I wrote "rural," I meant "rural." There isn't DSL service out here. The options are dialup modem, frame relay, and T1 circuits:
          • Dialup modem: simply not in the cards for any telecommuter who wants to be taken seriously in New York.
          • Frame relay: a dying service. Vendors are turning frame relay circuits off--I just picked up a bit of recurring change from a friend who was getting frame relay (~$500/month) from Verio. Verio told him to get lost, they were shutting down the service. He's co-lo'ing his server here.
          • T1: key point to understand: bandwidth prices are decreasing. A circuit that used to cost $1000 per month is now under $400. Next year it will be under $200. I was chatting with the CEO of a local CLEC Thursday evening, and he was loudly insisting that we will shortly be wiring houses for T1 and simply splitting off voice and data, if we don't just use VOIP instead.
        • Reliability: you have to be taken seriously. The "backup" plans that people have mentioned here are guaranteed to get you written off--run to Kinko's? Where? I just checked--there's a Kinko's in New Jersey that seems reasonably close: I could probably be there in two hours. If I'm driving all over the countryside looking for a Kinko's while the meeting continues without me, that's a lousy backup plan. If I'm conferencing in on an AMPS cell connection (we don't get PCS or GSM out here) that's a lousy backup plan. I have to have absolute reliability.

        I'm an independent consultant. I use VPN to connect to clients, and I use VPN to let associates connect to me. I choose to live in a rural area along the Appalachian Trail--but I work for clients in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, and Allentown. I'm not a telecommuter per se--but I face the same challenge: being taken seriously.

        If they don't take you seriously, you're toast:
        The original poster has decided to leave the big city and move to the Midwest. But he's still working for the company office in Manhattan. He has just been through the telecommuter's worst nightmare: he couldn't get stuff done because he couldn't connect. He fulfilled the predictions of the nay-sayers at work: he wasn't able to get something done. That has hurt his standing with his peers and with his management--it has hurt his credibility.

        Going after the local phone company for compensation is a waste of time. What he has to do is ensure it never happens again--which means that he has to identify a super-reliable technology, and assume personal responsibility for the problem. In management buzz-speak, he has to own the problem. Bitching about the lousy phone company is not "owning the problem"--doing something about it is. Spending $250 per month for a 256k circuit means taking ownership of the problem--if he has five 9s of reliability (which equates to 4 minutes of downtime per year) there's a pretty good likelihood that he's going to have better reliability than the office in Manhattan. When he has better uptime than they do, he looks a lot more serious, a lot more credible, than somebody frantically driving halfway to Chicago to find a Kinko's where he can use a web browser. (Tip from us hicks: Kinko's are not everywhere. And if you need a web browser, its a lot easier to go to a public library. They're all wired.)

        There is another dimension to this:
        He's telecommuting to an office in New York. Office workers in New York look down their noses at anybody else--somebody who announces that he's leaving the NY Metro area for Indiana is beneath contempt. He is not to be taken seriously. But--he definitely moves to the "did you hear about Bob?" list when he announces that he has a T1 circuit. (That's its only fractional is immaterial: in fact, he's got a full-bore T1 to the CO. But Bob doesn't need to share all the details.) And when Bob demonstrates better uptime than the office LAN, and hosts a presentation on his own web server, and then mentions that he's paying $400 per month for his mortgage payment...a lot of people might just wish that they were Bob.

        You can live and work in rural America. There are savings (my house costs less, my insurance costs less), there are lifestyle benefits (I'm a 4-H leader, and we have 4 horses), but there are costs too (the T1 circuit, the money we spend on gas to go anyplace). There are downsides to the lifestyle (it's a long way to a restaurant that doesn't have laminated menus or a drive-thru). But to be successful out here, over the long term, you absolutely must demonstrate consistency and reliability.

        A friend of mine, a long time ago, said that "you're only as good as your tools." He was talking about electrical equipment--but its just as true with computer equipment. If you're doing email from home at night and you live in a commuter suburb--hey, get a DSL line. If you're connecting to the corporate network full-time from an office in your home, don't bet your career on that DSL circuit. And if you're going completely remote--moving 800 miles away from the office like the original poster has done--you have to provide absolute reliability. You need every single one of those five 9s.

        And don't forget...
        If you have rock-solid bandwidth, you can easily implement VOIP. Which, for our friend from Indiana, makes him a technology leader....

        • My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January.
          Not to cut off your ode to the nature-life but it's irrelevant to the original posting.

          Yes connection prices are coming down though not as fast as some folks are hoping, but this is about today, a telecommuter in a city or suburb doing standard remote-office work. Not running servers overlooking the glen or broadcasting telepresentations but apparently the stuff that 90% of folks (and geeks) do working at home.

          Yes leaving The City freaks out its denizens. Heck I consult in one country and live in another six hours driving time away. I've had any number of folks who can't wrap their brains about it until I extol the quality of the patisserie down the block that calls me when my favorites come out of the oven and I describe going to the boucherie and charcuterie and fruiterie and the bistro we're going to dinner to tonight and the café I'm having my long lunch at... Then it all makes sense (somewhat) and I offer to tell them the best places to go when they visit.

          But folks also understand that things do OCCASIONIALLY happen to others off site (and on) and so yeah, paying $2500/year for the kind of connectivity you're talking is overkill, IMHO. We just hope that our once or twice a year downtime doesn't occur when anyone notices and when things do die we rush to the backups. However in this person's case there wasn't ever a primary - he would have done just as well NOT waiting around for the phone company to fix things (3 days, over & over) but instead just decamped somewhere else until he got installed.

          A failure didn't happen in the middle of something important and very rarely does for folks with functioning service. Indeed for myself and friends in the same position we seem to average out about one "Oh Shit!" time a year which is about the same or less for those back in the office pens. Indeed the vast majority of the time when a meeting goes south it's because someone's phone screws up or a PC hiccups, not because our urban & suburban high speed connections have any issues.

          Besides most of us just need to get into the company servers, read our email, get and put files, hit the CVS or database or whatever, print out jobs remotely, send and receive faxes, etc. While highspeed is clearly far preferable dropping down to something else for an hour or even a day isn't a terrible thing, at worst call it a sick day, but just one day. And make sure it's NOT rolling over to the next day and yes, we do have Kinko's & such, especially those in Midwestern cities.

          Again, your needs may vary but for most folks that f/T1 looks like big overkill. Glad you want to pay it and happy that it works for you but my $30/month cable, router with auto-kick-in dial-up and cellphone-with-a-cable-to-the-PC have stood me well the past five years. I've never had to apologize (ok, once, but I think tripping over the chair while pacing and knocking over the PC I was using is hardly a technical issue) and still gotten my quality-of-life, kept competitive.

          YMMV.

      • It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that .99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for)

        Permit me to elaborate: T1 circuits are sensitive to electrical storms. A T1 circuit terminates at a "Smart Card" in a box at the demarc point in your building. If your circuit goes down because of a power surge in the phone line, its the Smart Card that gets clobbered.

        One night the Smart Card got clobbered. The alarms went off (we have a testing program that keeps track of our Internet connection) and I called for help. The data circuit techs are in Bethlehem--about 25 miles away--and they couldn't get to me till early the next morning. It was a problem. The best solution to the problem was for the techs to walk me through a little bit of debugging and leave me with a Smart Card. If that circuit goes down now, I'm back up within a minute or two. The techs still have to come from Bethlehem--but they now know that it is not a rush, and they can expect coffee and doughnuts when they arrive.

        Am I getting the service I'm paying for? I think I am. As I wrote in my earlier reply, there are different aspects to life in rural America. Bitching at the techs when they appear just isn't done--they've come a long way, they have a lot of people to look after, and they have implemented a solution with me that guarantees less than 4 minutes of downtime per year. (We've been up continuously since August 8, BTW.) I'm paying for five 9s of reliability, and I'm getting it--I'm just getting it in a slightly different way than I would if I lived on Long Island. It's not polite to demand "what I paid for"--it's a lot smarter, and a lot more effective, to remember that the one tech that usually comes likes his coffee black, and his brother has Quarter Horses. And to repeat my offer that if his brother ever wants to ride the trails in the state park he can park his rig here and hack down the road.

        Seem crazy? There's method to this madness...
        A long time ago a friend and sometime colleague hired me as a consultant for a project at a big insurance company on Wall Street. Charlie (who is active on SlashDot) made sure that everybody knew that I lived near the Appalachian Trail--to hear Charlie tell it, we only wore clothes when we dressed up to go to town. Charlie and his co-workers lived their days amidst an endless sea of pea green 8' by 8' cubicles--hoping for the day when they'd get promoted one grade and move to a pea green 8' by 10' cubicle with arms on the chairs. The image of the wild man consultant living in the woods--chop a little wood, write a little code--really resonated with those people. It is an image that I have learned to cultivate--new clients learn early on that I'm a 4-H leader, and I'm not the slightest bit shy about blocking off days in the summer to take a trailer load of kids to a horse show. And if I do work there (I put up a canopy and work on my notebook, plugged into the AC adapter in the truck) I often as not will call the client on the cell phone. It makes a statement to the client that absolutely guarantees that I stand out in their minds.

  • I started telecommuting with the birth of my first son in October 1999. Initially, I had a dial-up connection over which I ran Citrix ICA (for corporate email connectivity) and K95 (for telnet connectivity to our UNIX/Linux servers; I was a legacy application/web developer). That sucked, but worked. I worked from home for the first weeks after "the delivery" but eventually returned to going into the office 4 days per week until my DSL line was installed.

    This was fantastic. Bronze-level service from GTE/Earthlink for $49.95/mo, paid for by my company, and I was able to work from home 50%. A funny thing happened: although I was going into the office sometimes 3 days per week, I was working more than 50% from home -- because I started working more and more when I was home. That's a documented problem, by the way, and flies in the face of naysayers who claim telecommuters only work bewteen Roise and Oprah (er, you know what I mean).

    Then the first glitches began: the DSL started getting flaky about 6 months into the contract. Since telnet doesn't like dropped connections (!) I was losing productivity. I started going to the office more to have a stable connection. Finally, for almost 2 months the DSL route to our colocation went from LA County to the Northeast back through Dallas/Irving and to a router on the fritz which would drop packets intermittently through the day before heading to Orange County, CA. Sometimes I could walk between Long Beach and Irvine before my packets would make the trip, it seemed. I was desperate, because I treasured being at home while working and loathed the commute. I tried and tried to escalate the problem -- I knew which router needed a kick, for crying out loud! -- but nothing ever happened. While I could get to slashdot.org just fine, I couldn't get to my company's servers (there are other causes for that besides network flakiness, I know, but in this case it was *really* a router. Really).

    Finally I took drastic action: I bought a laptop, a Toshiba 2805-202s, and installed Linux (initially SuSE 7.1 but eventually RedHat 7.1...then 7.2) and replicated my company's development server environment. This meant I had to get an old (and I mean OLD) legacy application running -- based on acucobol it was -- along with the webserver, application server middleware (perl/Mason and a c++ program that fed data bewteen the legacy app and the web). Then, since my work touched the back-, middle- and front-ends and since we were requiring MSIE 5+ for the corporate web application on Windows, I had to also run the same for development and testing. I chose Win4Lin and it, by God, worked. At this point I had a self-contained work environment which allowed me to fully develop and test the application I was developing without *any* Internet connectivity whatsoever. Freedom - "Free" as in "untethered."

    I could write perl, change page layout and form fields, add javascript, tweak apache, compile Cobol (the joy!) all on my laptop. This solved another problem: different work computers between home and office; the continuity between work sessions was broken by the different machines, tools, monitors, keyboards,etc. Now my work environment went with me wherever I would go. Consistency is cool.

    I even developed a new workstyle: no longer did I sit at a desk, but I used two chairs (not side-by-side for an ever-increasing butt) - one to sit in, the other for my feet. I positioned the laptop in my lap, feet on the chair and got down to business. To this day I don't use a desk -- and the pain that was starting in my wrists disappeared. Yeah, I'll never work again for Fidelity Investments sitting like this, but I couldn't care less.

    Of course, being off-line all the time wasn't practical and I did have to sync back to the development/production servers, but I was no longer reliant on broadband for my productivity. Since this time I'm changed jobs and still am able to work the same way: a replication of my work environment on my laptop. Often I'll leave home or the office and go to a secluded place to hack out a particularly difficult problem without the distactions of being online (I think this will be post #800+ for me on slashdot ;-). My favorite place to be sequestered? A local tavern, of course!

    To answer the question about getting reimbursed for lost productivity -- forget it, take matters into you own hands.

    • Your experience is similar to mine and my employees.

      I am a microsoft dot whore, so all my web development is asp and SQL server. If I can get away with it I will run a development server from my home office and upload a daily update. If the project is too big or there are more than one programmer then I will host it at the office and use Terminal Services to manage the server.

      And yes, people are working longer when we tell them to telecommute and use flex time. Some people work 10-12 hrs (with decent output) instead of the 5-6 hrs of productive work I dream of them getting while at the office.

      I dunno about Oprah, but I got a Hauppauge card in my main home PC and I got used to watch Maury Povich while catching up the morning wave of emails. Then the rest of the day it was The Hitler Channel...oops, I mean The History Channel. If you have a quiet home office and a TV playing documentaries you can code for hours without even noticing.

      Which is a bad thing.

      Eventually I got sick of working at my home office for more than two days in a row. What I try to do now is go to the office 3 days a week. Depending on meetings I may not be at the office before 11:00 AM or after 3:00 PM. The way the projects are run it does not matter where we are as long as the work is done.

      Now, one thing I learned in the last few months is that it is better to rotate around the house and not stay holed into the home office. I convinced the IT folks to assign me a laptop on top of the desktop I kept at the office (employees are usually allowed to sign for one computer).

      I put a wireless card on the laptop and got a wireless access point. Now I can wake up at 7:00 AM, read the first wave of emails and then doze off until 10:00 AM, which is the time when most of the people will be up and ready to work. I can take the laptop to starbucks and connect to the wireless network in the nearby CompUSA (the idiots could not figure out WEP, so they left it off). That way I can keep an eye on email and instant messages.

      If I want to take a nap in the afternoon I put the cordless phone and laptop by the bed, so I am always reachable.

      Of course, people abuse the system. If project managers start to complain that they cannot reach you when they need you or that your work is lacking quality then you will lose these privileges pretty quickly.

  • There are lots of things one can criticize about DSL and broadband providers, but this just doesn't seem like one of them. Either your business pays for a business line and gets better service, or you get the residential line and the second rate service.

    Your most reliable bet is probably to get a second means of access; I mean, you have several choices: dial-up, wireless, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc. And you can always pick up your laptop and head to your local Internet cafe.

    Besides, you can have downtime at work, too, when you can't work. Like when the coffee machine is malfunctioning.

  • Midwest... I'll bet Ameritech (Score:3, Informative)

    by Multics ( 45254 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @07:14PM (#3099286) Journal
    I do a lot of consulting and I'm busy moving my customers out of Ameritech (especially Indiana) because Ameritech is corrupt, uneducated, incoherent slime. Just this week I had an installer just storm off a job site cursing 'I don't need this f**king shit' with the customer down and the job marked 'complete'. He was there to repair the damage done by the previous Ameritech installer. It took four installers, four days to put in two simple POTS lines in a vaguely complex wiring closet of Ameritech's design.

    I personally have caused Indiana to lose several million dollars in tax revenue. Ameritech is one of the major reasons that people whine about the 'Indiana brain drain' where Indiana trained graduates move somewhere else to get high-paying real jobs. Can't get reasonably priced data services? Why locate in Indiana? -- simple! don't!

    Move somewhere else. Get away from Ameritech since there is near zero hope that any governmental body is going to have any opportunity to get these bozos broken up or otherwise reformed. When all that is left is backwards, tiny companies that don't depend on communications then Ameritech served states might figure out it is an incompetent telecommunications company that is the problem. In the mean time, the number and length of outages is going to constantly go up and up because there is no one left inside the organization that has a clue how the system works.

    -- Multics

    • nope - not Ameritech - sounds similar, though

      Just from a customer service perspective, it sounded like my telco has some serious internal organization issues...during one of my many calls, I found out that they have 3 regions, and 4 different applications that they need to use for each region. Info can appear in one system but not another...get changed in one system but not another. As a result, the customer (me) and the customer service agent (the person on the phone with me) does not know that install dates are automatically changed...or that phone numbers for provision are automatically changed to correct for "human error"...human error that didn't exist, but the system thought it did because of a failure in one of their other 3 applications!!!

      I don't blame the poor schmucks on the phone who have to deal with me all day...just the poor schmuck at the company who failed to upgrade their software accordingly when their business expanded so severely. I have noticed some difference in competence with the 10-20 cust service reps I've spoken with this past month...but none of them sounded like total idiots. They're working with crap for software.
  • Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare

    Wow. I'd like to know where in Blacksburg you live, Cliff. I know that we got royally screwed over by Adelphia's plans to move to two-way cable, ending up being out of service for over a week in two separate incidences. This put me at least a week behind in some of my work, and got some of my clients quite irate with me.

    But when I called up Adelphia to tel lthem of my situation, the following quote "Our service is intended for personal use only, and is not guaranteed for any "profit-making ventures"". Now the fact that I actually worked for Adelphia for a while so I had the inner hand in who to talk to didn't make a difference here...this was their policy and we were screwed.

    As far as Blacksburg goes, if you have in-apartment ethernet, you're golden. Things otherwise have gotten better...but it has defintely had its rough spots.
  • If we're going to be bantering around a term, let's at least define it. What is 'rural' to you? Location, city density, nearest larger city (10,000+). Some schmoe tried to tell me that Mankato, Minn. was rural. So I have to ask.

    How about 4 miles outside of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, adjacent to a state park? We don't live in a city--we're in a Class III township in eastern Pennsylvania. The northern boundary of the township is the Appalachian Trail.

  • Few small businesses spring for the cost of an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for their connections. Even if you do, normally you'll just be able to get back the cost of the connection for the period when it wasn't working. Getting a service vendor to pay for your lost time is a pretty unusual agreement. Normally this kind of protection is obtained via an insurance policy -- think of it like the cancellation insurance that a concert promoter buys. As you might imagine, buying a policy to protect against comm outages and other things usually viewed as force majeure situations (i.e. 'acts of God') is not cheap.

    Moreover, in most places business customers subsidize home customers. So if you really want your home account to be treated like a business, plan to pay 2-4 times as much for the same service, with no guarantees.

    At least that's been my experience in several different locations with a variety of providers over 22 years in business.
  • What is 'rural' to you?

    I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the "what is rural?" question. I live in Montana. Population of the entire state is around a Million. Most of the eastern part's population density is measured in square miles per person instead of people per square mile.

    I'm in the 5th largest city. Population about 50,000 or so in the "Greater" area. As an ISP We service people in what we call rural areas which don't even have phone service (we do a lot of wireless) because how far out they are. We're discussing expanding into areas with population of under a thousand in the local dialing area.

    The problem is that I don't think that some people get it... It cost a LOT to drag bandwidth out here. Especially when you're dragging a DS3 equivalent a hundred miles to service 1000 people assuming if you get everyone in town.
    • I'm in the 5th largest city. Population about 50,000 or so in the "Greater" area. As an ISP We service people in what we call rural areas which don't even have phone service (we do a lot of wireless) because how far out they are. We're discussing expanding into areas with population of under a thousand in the local dialing area.

      The problem is that I don't think that some people get it... It cost a LOT to drag bandwidth out here. Especially when you're dragging a DS3 equivalent a hundred miles to service 1000 people assuming if you get everyone in town.

      Suggestion for you? Look into your ILEC's tariff structure. You may find the same kind of thing that my ISP discovered--that pricing may be available with a "local loop charge" that doesn't limit how big that local loop can be. Or you may discover that there's some other way to colo your CPE in the local CO and share bandwidth with the ILEC back to the larger community.

      This is rural Pennsylvania. There are parts that do not have local telephone service (and a guy who used to work for me got his phone bill written by hand). But we're not nearly as rural as you are.

  • I've been telecommuting (mainly) for over 15 years now (even before the Net was widely available)and have found that you really need some redundancy for both your phone and internet connection.

    It's pretty easy to get a couple of flat-rate internet accounts which will generally protect you from all but the worst disasters.

    As for phone lines -- I have three lines coming into my house (voice, fax, modem) which gives me a little redundancy but, unfortunately, it seems that when one line goes out, so do the other two.

    For this reason I also have a cellphone and cellular data modem on the shelf for "worst case" situations.

    Of course you also need a spare PC, a good UPS and a backup generator if you really want 100% up-time (yes I have all of the above).

    As a result of these measures, I've never lost more than an hour or two due to ISP or telco foul-ups.

    The price of this redundancy is nothing when you compare it to the loss of a day's work.
  • In my experience it's rarely the local loop (i.e., phone company) at fault when a connection drops - it's almost always your ISP "doing maintenance" or just having a bad day.

    So don't blame the phone company - call your ISP and get credit for the day, or the month if it happens often enough. But that won't compensate you for lost connectivity = work time. Use FedEx or get a second link (cable modem) complete with second NIC, connection reconfiguration scripts, whatever it takes. As a telecommuter, it's your responsibility to stay available and in touch, not your phone company, ISP, cable supplier, whoever. They'll never pay your lost wages or any other damages above line cost.

    Now, when IPv6 comes along things might change - you might be able to get a Business Grade QoS commitment from your ISP - for a high Business Class price, of course.

  • Not a Good Idea (Score:2, Informative)

    by Mr Jekler ( 520288 )
    Using a residential service to perform business functions is illogical. ISPs specifically sell business-class services for a reason. I currently work for a residential broadband isp (who offers business services as well). I'd hazard to say 25% of the callers say "You don't understand, I CAN'T be down for a whole day, I'm running BUSINESS here, a BUSINESS! (Always the emphasis on the word "business"), I'm losing x amount of money!" Each and every time, our response is "We do offer a business-class service for as low as $200 a month..." to which their response is always "I can't afford $200 a month!!!" Seriously, a residential service has no reliability, the one I happen to work for doesn't have any garauntees on uptime, reliability, stability, speed, and absolutely no garauntees on when we'll be able to repair service if it goes down. You get it fixed when we're able to fix it. As opposed to the business class service, that has a 99.9% uptime garauntee, 24/7 on-site technical support (Within 4 hours of reported problem), and 50% rated line speed garauntee (If you sign up for the 512kbps package, garaunteed to get at least 256kbps) I think the real kicker is, these same people that complain about how their business is affected, is never willing to troubleshoot or pay for additional assistance (example: Pay to have a technician visit, diagnose, and repair a problem). They want garaunteed uptime, T1 speeds, same-day technician calls, 24/7 technical support, reimbursement for lost wages, and they expect to get all that for $50 a month. If anyone knows about a $50 a month garauntee wage reimbursement system, sign me up. Some type of insurance company "Can't do your job? We'll pay you your full wages for only $50 a month!" If your business, job, etc. doesn't pay you enough to telecommute using a business-class service, maybe you should just get out of telecommuting. Every one of these people who calls in about running a business or working from home makes it sound like they're running a multi-million dollar international corporation from their basement. If you can only afford $50 a month for business expenses, maybe you should go over your business plan. You get precisely what you pay for, if you pay for a residential service, you get it. Along with all the down-time, instability, congestion, ping spikes, and slow technical support response time that comes with it. If you want to run a business, or work from home, you need a business service. It's like trying to do the indy 500 in a yugo and wanting to sue the company because the engine's just not keeping up with the other cars. "I pay $400 a month for rent! What do you mean I can't run a multi-national corporation out of my apartment? And by the way, I want reimbursement for the loss of business because the elevator was broken last week and my R&D team couldn't deliver the prototype to me." Pfft! Jekler

  • 3 year telecommuter (Score:2, Informative)

    by Shipwright ( 175684 )
    Hiya,

    I have been telecommuting since September, 1999. I've got business phone and data lines. Last year somebody put a leaking airconditioner right over the PBX at Verizon's CO and there was no service in my exchange for a day. IMHO, getting satisfaction from the phone company is an after the fact thing.
    • Use a cell or drive to a phone and let one or more people at work know what's going on.
    • Get an estimate of downtime from the phone company
    • Review the amount of critical work you have to do
    • Decide whether to catch some rays or drive to work or to a Kinkos or a friend's house in another exchange (a good arrangement to make beforehand).

    That's what I do, anyway. Usually work is understanding and I get to goof off. Since they run Microsoft and I don't they have TONS more downtime than I do out in the sticks with my 26K modem connection so they don't begrudge me a little downtime.

    -Greg
  • ...I find it somewhat amusing that a number of posters (not just those limited to this thread) assume that because I moved from New Jersey to the Midwest it means that I moved to a more rural area. The opposite is true, actually.

    In Jersey, we lived in Mt. Arlington, a tiny town on Lake Hopatcong, not too far from the Delaware Water Gap (a fairly rural area). Here in Minnesota, we live just a few minutes north of Minneapolis.

    And, for the record, I am relieved that I am no longer in New Jersey ;) I liked it there for the time I was there, but this was a good move.

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