[plug] Business Grade ADSL Recommendation

[Paul Antoine]

Adam,

I was about to say the same :-)  As you said, if you need 100% uptime on 
your link you'd better be sure you also have the hardware setup to 
connect to it, with power backup using UPS, generator, backup generator 
etc.). Otherwise move your gear to a colo... and then make sure it's a 
damn good one with network admins that know what they're doing and their 
generator doesn't die the first time it's really needed.

At a startup I ran in San Francisco we had all our gear in a telco-grade 
colo which looked fantastic and had great techies with whom we got on 
very well.  Nonetheless, our network went out when one of their routers 
was screwed by a config change done in their Colorado headquarters, and 
the power went out because the generator failed to start when the power 
went out (despite being tested monthly.)

All that for $US1500 a month... 100%?  No such thing...

P.

Adam Hewitt wrote:
> 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.
> 
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