On Sun, 13 Oct 1996, David J. Schmidt wrote:
There's another thing that hasn't been mentioned during this thread.
Suppose BBN did ALL of the necessary upgrades to prevent this sort of outage. Not only at this site, but at all of their sites.
Great.
Now they come to you, their customer and say "Well, we've made all of these improvements, but we now have to raise your rates by 50% to cover the costs."
No way, most of the things mentioned that need to be done before you put a build a pop are free. Things like generators are not a lot of money, and a nice little manual bypass switch is about 2K. Things can be done, I don't think all of us should build POPs 100 feet under the ground, but there are things we can do that can help.
How many of you would simply change providers?
An editorial in Unix Review (October issue I believe) talked about some outages that their site had suffered and mentioned other outages. Then the writer asked the question "Who's at fault?". His answer was that the consumer was at fault, because the consumer is unwilling to pay the rates necessary to pay for the level of service that they demand.
No way, this stuff is not that much. A generator cost less then a router, and most of the things you can do to help are free.
We all scream for fixes when these outages occur. How much are we (and our customers) willing to pay for them?
Look, I don't think people are asking for 100% uptime, but 99.999 is a valid goal, and can be reached. I had to learn that hard way that a generator at every pop was something was saved you money. Nathan Stratton CEO, NetRail, Inc. Tracking the future today! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Phone (703)524-4800 NetRail, Inc. Fax (703)534-5033 2007 N. 15 St. Suite 5 Email sales@netrail.net Arlington, Va. 22201 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Access: (703) 524-4802 guest --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Matthew 6:34