Between 16:07:13 and 17:36:13 AEST our internet link was down. The cause is currently unknown and reflects the reality that ADSL is still not production-ready in Australia. If I were running a business that absolutely demanded internet access or 99.999% uptime for email and web, I’d be looking at ISDN or Telstra’s business-ready solutions.

ADSL doesn’t cut it. But it is cheap.

Having said that, corporately, we require reasonable email access, and this blog uses most of our corporate bandwidth. So to my comms buddies, “relax , I don’t need to upgrade yet.”

If my business needed say an e-commerce website I’d host it with a commercial hosting company. It’s hard to beat their infrastructure and uptime guarantees.

Speaking of guarantees, why would anybody accept an IT services guarantee without non-performance financial penalties that exceed of a refund on down-time? I have to take that from Telstra because we aren’t big enough to warrant a sales executive to ourselves. But many larger companies accept the flimsiest of guarantees.

If a service is pay-as-you-go isn’t some of the value in the ability to use it immediately or continuously? So a refund of say 30% if my internet service is unavailable for 30% of the month implies no premium for continous service. I’d expect that if a guaranteed service level was breached in any business area the refund would be more than the pro-rata interruption. For the record no Austalian ISP’s (that I know of) offer any guarantees of suitability or service.

What do you think?