Re: generators, etc....

[Nathan Stratton <nathan () netrail net>]

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!
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