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fiberguy
My views are my own.
Premium
join:2005-05-20
| reply to rradina
Re: Outages for me
Actually, while I agree that 3PV is is USUALLY not the MAIN issue for problems, 3PV is FAR from 5 9's. Vonage has had more problems, outage, etc that I know of than I ever have with POTS service in my entire life. And, to be honest, I've only had a POTS outage once ever...
I call it a toy, and will continue to, because of what it is. They DON'T have control of quality, reliability, etc. I also disagree that broadband today is a problem. Does it go down? yes.. is it perfect and running at peak efficiency all the time? HELL no... but, it's a residential service and was never intended to be a life line or a service with any kind of solid reliability to handle such apps as phone.
Many people on this site believe that the BB service they receive in their home for the price they do should run problem free and be as reliable, if not more, than business class services. The fact is, many business class services have problems as well. Now, put the two together. the expectation is that their residential broadband should never slow down and never go out - which is what business service SHOULD be, but isn't either.
Like you, I've had vonage from the beginning. I do like the service.. the price is OK for one line, expensive when you get into more than one line since they don't discount, but to be honest with you, since they can't stand by the service from stem to stern, I will still call it a toy of a service... Is the concept good? Sure... is it ready for prime time? Not in the least.
Another 'real' problem is that if companies like Vonage are going to market themselves as a "phone company" then they should have the same responsibility. I think that they should NOT be allowed to market themselves as such since they are not. Communications service? Sure.. Phone service? Phone company? no.. they aren't... not in the context in which people are expecting them to be. | |
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO
| Couldn't agree more on the "phone service" claim. It gripes my ass to pay USF fees on my Vonage line just so the "non toy" companies, as you put it, can feed at the public trough.
I think consumer broadband is reliable. From my perspective, the plant isn't the typical problem. Sure there are fiber cuts and storm damage but it's rare to have an outage related to an actual plant issue. It's more likely that the outage is related to the "NOC staff spilled a cup of coffee" syndrome. This stems from either incompetence or a "best effort" attitude from the ISPs. They typically blow their own foot off with lack of redundant systems or careless maintenance.
Of course this attitude isn't just limited to ISPs. From my experience it's prevalent in most corporate environments (locally, MasterCard and some brokerage firms seem to get it.) Gone are the days when the mainframe never died and maintenance wasn't performed in the middle of the business day. (Where I work they actually had the UPS vendor performing maintenance over lunch on a Friday. The vendor did something wrong and the entire data center lost power. One would expect a $40B company to have the technical service talent to know you perform maintenance on the power systems during a quiet block time on Sunday morning. If there is no block time then the company should have an RDFed hot backup data center so that services can fail over if such maintenance goes wrong.)
One could use the excuse that today's services are much more complex and error prone than the mainframe of yesterday. However, somehow the car industry manages. Today's vehicles are far more reliable than ever even though complexity and customer demands always increase.
Considering even business class computing infrastructure, has anyone ever released v1.0 that works without the need to patch? And most problems requiring patch aren't minor issues. They usually lead to total failures. | |
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