You are the backup
Poking around the AP newswire for details on their satellite problems yesterday I found AP retired their previous backup system. For most AP customers the Internet is the primary backup. A few AP customers also had ISDN or FAX backup. Whether folks tell us or not, the net seems to be included in more and more backup plans.
I actually had a paging company, when I was discussing "how do I get alpha pages to you", said "The internet is the primary method." They also indicated that they were preparing to retire their TAP servers as such method of out-of-band page delivery was "antiquated". I asked "If I am reporting a critical router failure via an alphanumeric pager, how would it get to you?" to which they responded "over the net of course". After drawing it out for them on a whiteboard, they finally understood the problem. Only after screaming loudly was I able to convince them that our mid-sized pager contract (couple hundred pagers) was going to vanish into thin air (at the time, our IXC was begging for it) if they made my TAP port vanish into thin air. They finally did decide that "hey, maybe that TAP port is useful for something after all", but I can't believe the amount of work it took to convince them that "internet delivery" is not always the end-all-be-all solution for all things. (not to mention that the TAP port averaged about 8 minutes faster on page delivery than bouncing through whatever internal mail servers we had and whatever systems they had) D At 5:46 PM -0700 8/30/00, Sean Donelan wrote:
Poking around the AP newswire for details on their satellite problems yesterday I found AP retired their previous backup system. For most AP customers the Internet is the primary backup. A few AP customers also had ISDN or FAX backup.
Whether folks tell us or not, the net seems to be included in more and more backup plans.
For non critical pages we use internet email, and it beats dial pages (when the internet & the mail servers are operating well) by about 15 seconds. (dial being about 20 seconds from hitting the "#" sign). YMMV, Deepak Jain AiNET On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Derek J. Balling wrote:
I actually had a paging company, when I was discussing "how do I get alpha pages to you", said "The internet is the primary method." They also indicated that they were preparing to retire their TAP servers as such method of out-of-band page delivery was "antiquated".
I asked "If I am reporting a critical router failure via an alphanumeric pager, how would it get to you?" to which they responded "over the net of course". After drawing it out for them on a whiteboard, they finally understood the problem. Only after screaming loudly was I able to convince them that our mid-sized pager contract (couple hundred pagers) was going to vanish into thin air (at the time, our IXC was begging for it) if they made my TAP port vanish into thin air.
They finally did decide that "hey, maybe that TAP port is useful for something after all", but I can't believe the amount of work it took to convince them that "internet delivery" is not always the end-all-be-all solution for all things.
(not to mention that the TAP port averaged about 8 minutes faster on page delivery than bouncing through whatever internal mail servers we had and whatever systems they had)
D
At 5:46 PM -0700 8/30/00, Sean Donelan wrote:
Poking around the AP newswire for details on their satellite problems yesterday I found AP retired their previous backup system. For most AP customers the Internet is the primary backup. A few AP customers also had ISDN or FAX backup.
Whether folks tell us or not, the net seems to be included in more and more backup plans.
When do you hit "#" when sending alpha pages? ;-) At 9:31 PM -0400 8/30/00, Deepak Jain wrote:
For non critical pages we use internet email, and it beats dial pages (when the internet & the mail servers are operating well) by about 15 seconds. (dial being about 20 seconds from hitting the "#" sign).
On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 06:46:02PM -0700, Derek J. Balling wrote:
When do you hit "#" when sending alpha pages? ;-)
For most alpha paging systems, hitting the # key ends the message and sends the page without waiting for you to hang up. Ben -- Ben Beuchler insyte@bitstream.net MAILER-DAEMON (612) 321-9290 x101 Bitstream Underground www.bitstream.net
participants (4)
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Ben Beuchler -
Deepak Jain -
Derek J. Balling -
Sean Donelan