On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, David Robb wrote:
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006, Simon Allard wrote:
You can't expect good uptimes and run your business which requires high availability internet on a $39.95 DSL account.
Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two.
Where Good==Reliable, I assume? Since the relative goodness of broadband products for most consumers is often associated with their fastness and cheapness, with reliability (provided one can actually pass packets, of course) being an unconsidered factor. I do agree with Dean that we know you can't reasonably expect multiple nines of reliability from a residential service, but we, as geeks, have far different expectations from the average consumer. Plus, with NZ's high incidence of home-based businesses, how many users have actually had ANY choice of carrier until quite recently? I can probably get Woosh at home, and we have a Telecom landline. What are my other choices? TCL is still delivering over TCNZ's cable, so that's a non-starter. I could maybe get hooked into Vector's fibre, though I don't think it comes quite far enough down Great South Rd. And I'm in a better position than a lot of residential users, who can't get Woosh and aren't even close to someone's fibre network. When people have no choice, is it any wonder that they expect the earth for nothing? Nobody's telling them about the limitations of the one service they can afford, and nobody's offering them anything with better reliability for a reasonable price - what would one pay for a 2Mbps frame connection that, while unquestionably giving better upstream performance, comes in, at best, at half the downstream speed of a DSL connection? Many, many multiples of $40/month, that's for sure. Total no-brainer. We can sneer at the great unwashed, but the reality is that the marketroids aren't offering anything to fill the gaping void between DSL and frame/ISDN (does anyone even use ISDN for data anymore?). PS: Why pay metric boatloads for something like frame when Telecom won't give you credit if their network fails? Nobody got a cent out of them after the rat and the errant backhoe took out much of the country for several hours, so what's the point in handing them extra? Pardon the pun. -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer."