IP: RE: A personal view from your IP Editor -- A missed Broadband Opp ortunity

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Anthony Dye <ADye () evokesoft com>
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> Subject: RE: A personal view from your IP Editor -- A missed Broadband Opp
>         ortunity
> Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 14:43:01 -0700
> X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
>
> You can send this out if you like...
>
> My company (Evoke Software) was completely abandoned by Northpoint AND our
> provider, Verio. Verio made only the barest of efforts to contact us about
> the impending demise of Northpoint; the email address they had was bad (typo
> on their part) and they made no effort to phone anyone from the company,
> even though they have numerous contact numbers for us. If we hadn't paid a
> bill, I'm sure they would have been in rapid contact with us... but customer
> service is not their strong point. Verio no longer provides new DSL
> accounts, even for their Northpoint users. Our San Francisco office uses
> Verio and Covad, but Verio wouldn't give us a Covad line. They offered us
> free dialup for 60 days... of course, we only have 4 analog lines for
> dialout, and we'd have to open up our firewall in SF to let the connections
> in.
> They also offered to upgrade us to T-1 access (30 days to install), or else
> we could call Earthlink and maybe get DSL from them...
>
> So, Monday morning, our entire Austin office was suddenly without access to
> the net. Time Warner Cable says it'll take 90 days to get us cable modem
> access, SWBell can get us a new DSL line by Thursday of next week.
>
> Both options stink... we're sharing modems, 10 people to a connection, until
> SWBell can get out here.
>
> Lesson? No business should go with DSL if they can possibly avoid it. The
> lack of a SLA means that outages can last for hours, or days, or forever,
> and companies have no recourse, legal or otherwise. SWBell won't even
> prorate your bill for the downtime. They make no guarantees of uninterrupted
> service, either. Get a fractional T-1 if you can, and if not, make sure all
> your public servers are co-located somewhere else.
>
> And make sure you've got a different connection set up for emergencies. When
> you consider what it's costing us to be without net access, the cost of
> maintaining a 128K ISDN line is pretty insignificant.
>
> -Tony Dye
>  Technical Services
>  Evoke Software



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