>From: "Mark Foster" <blakjak@blakjak.net>
>And perhaps members of adsl@ being of varying backgrounds can help...

>As a helpdesk staffer I get the odd customer who likes to rant (for lack of
>a better term) about how their lack of internet service is costing them
>business/money...

Businesses don't understand technical stuff, a failure costs money in two
areas, loss of productivity and the cost of paying someone to diagnose the
cause of the failure.

>Now.. I use the Internet a lot personally as well as for work (both my
>major job and any behind the scenes stuff I do online). I do my best to
>install some redundancy.
>I have Dialups with 3 ISPs as well as my DSL...

My guess is that 80% of our Jetstream clients have no idea what a DSL
connection is, they want to send and receive email, do the payroll/creditors
via Internet banking and share information between branches.
Installing redundancy for a business is complex, *you* have the technical
ability to decide when to switch to backup, but for a business it has to be
simple or automatic.

>When one ISP fails chances are another will work..
>I recognise that for email in particular, this is often a problem

We don't have the email issue, we deliver/accept email via VPN tunnels thus
the SMTP delivery is tied to a VPN username rather than a site's static IP
address.

Even with that in place it is difficult to decide when to switch from DSL to
modem. Jetstream has the horrible feature that it "dies" for only a few
minutes, by the time the modem has dialed Jetstream is back on line and you
just blew some cost on the dialup accepting a 10MB email.

The issue is frequency of failure, backup is there for the once every three
month outage, Jetstream fails once a day, hence the ranting customers.

Cheers

BG.

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