rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO
| reply to fiberguy
Re: Outages for me
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. |
