[LUAU] TCP/IP WANs

[Doug Stanfield]

Rob,

Although I usually try not to let my professional bias color my posts to
this list, I can't let this one go by without a response:

bbraun at sparcy.synack.net [mailto:bbraun at sparcy.synack.net] wrote:
> 
> At first, cable modem seems like a good plan assuming you do the
> business route with oceanic.  However, in the last 2 weeks I've been
> in hawaii, we're shooting about 30% uptime with our cable modem.
> I think it has been working only 3 or 4 days out of the 2 weeks.
> Support response time has been infinite.  No response other than
> pre recorded messages.  Not great if you want to run a business by
> this.
>
If this is true (not that I doubt you) its not acceptable to me personally.
I know this can't be a widespread experience for our customers.  I'm not
going to be happy unless we have nearly 100% uptime.  This is what the vast
majority of Road Runner users are used to.  If you have this bad a
connection I'd hope you'd give me a chance to research and get it fixed.  If
you email me privately with the serial number of the modem in question I
promise to look in to it.  If its truly that hard to get into our customer
service agents, I need to pass that on as well.

Every business has faults but the committment is very strong at Oceanic to
be responsive to our customers.  There are some very good people that take
it very seriously and want to fix these kinds of problems before customers
get frustrated to the point of publicly venting.  I would guess that if you
were really experiencing only 60% uptime from GTE they'd like the same
opportunity to solve things.
 
>  First choice would be a real router such as a 
> Cisco 2500
> series router.  The reason is because of reliability and 
> standardization.
> Like it or not, Cisco is what people expect to find if the 
> current support
> staff is either supplimented or replaced.  Also, a real router is much
> more reliable than PC hardware.  Everything from the power 

Some die hards dispute the reliability comparison, but if you have the right
support contract with Cisco they'll get replacement equipment to you very
fast.  They also have a router to router VPN solution.  Others do also,
Ascend being one that right now is promoting it heavily (meaning discounts).
I think Ascend has a number of interface options, Frame Relay and ISDN being
two (left the brochure at work so not absolutely sure).  They also have a PC
VPN client to go with it that I thinks gives secure remote access.  Both
these solutions can be very cheap, I think less than $2K per end.  These
solutions win if KISS setup is what you want, else Linux on a couple of
cheap but reliable old boxes would be killer.

Doug Stanfield			Oceanic Cable
Data Networking Manager		200 Akamainui St.
dougs at oceanic.com		Mililani, HI  96789