[plug] Business Grade ADSL Recommendation

[Adam Hewitt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
> Behalf Of Daniel Pearson (Flashware Solutions)
> Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2007 7:28 AM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] Business Grade ADSL Recommendation
> 
> Paul Antoine wrote:
> > Daniel Pearson (Flashware Solutions) wrote:
> >> Not really a business grade connection, though..
> >
> > Pardon my ignorance, but in what way exactly do you consider it not
> > business grade DSL?
> >
> > Or rather, given the criteria Mark gave:
> >
> >>>> 1 - Affordable
> >>>> 2 - Static IP
> >>>> 3 - No Shaping / blocked ports
> >>>> 4 - The ability to purchase additional GB per month if needed.
> > How does iiNet not meet these, especially given Mark had been using
> > Optus DSL?
> >
> > P.
> Business grade DSL has a proper SLA in place, with guaranteed uptime
> (and supposedly support).
> 
> iiNet's "business pack" doesn't provide that. Happy to be proven wrong
> though, but for only $30 / month extra on top of their normal 'home'
> plans, I think you'll find its not true business grade.


SLA's, guaranteed uptime, compensation etc are all a load of crap. If anyone
has actually read the terms and conditions on most SLA's you will find that
the chances of you ever getting money back is extremely low. Telstra's
business solution, IPWan, has an SLA which states that the services must be
down for more than 12 hours without support 'responding' to your fault and
then you can claim for each hour after the initial 12 hours up to a maximum
of half the monthly service cost. *THEN* they need to have been down for a
minimum period for the month as well. So for an outage lasting more than
half a day you *might* get a couple of hundred dollars back....nothing
compared to the business loss.

Also the SLA's are only prevalent (most of the time) on the single link
between you and the carrier. If they happen to have a crappy core network
then you will still get crap response times to the US and crappy stability
and uptime to anywhere other than your next hop.

They are not worth the paper they are printed on.

I have an ADSL2+ connection with iiNet which connects at 19/1 and in the 6
years or so that I have had ADSL with iiNet I have probably had to call them
once. If you are on a Telstra DSLAM then the reliability is probably less
due to having multiple proxy radius servers plus extra backhaul legs, but
the iiNet DSLAMS (and I would guess other private DSLAMS) are very stable.

In my opinion ADSL is fine for normal business operation. If you need 100%
uptime for critical services then you should be looking at redundant WAN
links anyways.

Adam.