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Grex > Coop12 > #14: Internet Connectivity Revisited |  |
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| 25 new of 176 responses total. |
janc
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response 62 of 176:
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May 2 01:10 UTC 2001 |
I'd forgotten that we had rack mount cases. It's true that we could fit the
whole thing into a rack without much pain.
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devnull
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response 63 of 176:
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May 2 23:28 UTC 2001 |
I'd be interested in seeing photos of the existing wiring mess if anyone
wanted to take the time to put them on the web.
I think if Grex could find the right friendly colo provider, colo would
be a good way to go, but my experience also indicates that if you don't
personally know some of the people at the colo facility, life can be painful.
(At one point, I was working for a company that hosted its web server at Level
3. On two occasions, they lost our network connection. I physically went
over there, since it took all of ten minutes to walk from the office to the
colo facility, and then got to call the people in Denver to get the problem
fixed, and the folks in Denver just didn't seem to care all that much.
In spite of the fact that we were paying like $1200/mo for the rack and
bandwidth.)
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janc
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response 64 of 176:
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May 3 02:50 UTC 2001 |
The problem with finding a colo provider with a friendly person working at
is is that nobody seems to stay in jobs like that for very long.
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mdw
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response 65 of 176:
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May 5 05:00 UTC 2001 |
$1200/mo is a lot more than we pay now. If that's the going rate,
switching won't save us any $. Another factor to consider is: right
now, the pumpkin has extra storage space for spares, future development,
etc., essentially "for free". A colo deal is *very* unlikely to include
such space. That means any spares, development work, etc., would have
to take place "elsewhere" - either in space we rent for the purpose (in
which case we're right back to the pumpkin case), or in people's private
homes. We've had a policy in the past of avoiding using people's
private homes for storage - and in the cases where grex has violated
this (including the CE warehouse which we got "for free") it has never
worked well in the long run.
An additional factor to consider is "who" has "what" kind of access.
What we'd like to have is unlimited 24 hr access for about 6-8 staff
members. Most of the work done will be after hours or weekends, because
that's when our volunteer staff has time. What we found is that colo
deals typically only include access during "business" hours, and usually
want to limit access to the smallest # of people possible -- 1-2. This
is very similar to the type of access we had at CE. This works great,
as long as the equipment works and no upgrades are done (or are planned
*very* carefully in advance). It also works well for most commercial
businesses, which have full-time staff during regular hours, and enough
budget to replace any or all hardware if it's even remotely suspected of
being flakey. It works terribly if something goes flakey and one is
trying to conserve money and not replace things until proven guilty, and
it really sucks when something goes dead at the start of a long weekend.
We had both of these problems at CE.
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scg
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response 66 of 176:
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May 5 05:50 UTC 2001 |
Only one of the colo providers I was dealing with in SE Michigan before I
moved had that sort of time restrictions.
Colo prices are something that vary considerably, depending on what sort of
facility it's in, what market they're selling to, and that sort of thing.
$1200 per month is certainly a valid datapoint, but certainly not the cheapest
it comes.
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devnull
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response 67 of 176:
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May 6 01:42 UTC 2001 |
There are rare cases of people staying at ISP jobs consistently. However,
I don't know of any such people around Ann Arbor.
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krj
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response 68 of 176:
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May 25 13:15 UTC 2001 |
Covad released a financial report yesterday. It's not pretty.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2001/05/24/financial1
922EDT0395.DTL
> Three months after it was scheduled to release its 2000 financial
> results, high-speed Internet provider Covad Communications Group Inc.
> reported a $1.4 billion loss Thursday and lowered its results for
> previous quarters.
>
> Santa Clara-based Covad also disclosed that its auditors have raised
> doubts about whether it will remain an ongoing concern. Chairman
> Charles McMinn said the company has enough cash to stay in business
> through the second quarter of 2002 and is seeking additional funding.
Well, the bit about staying in business for a year is somewhat reassuring.
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aruba
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response 69 of 176:
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May 25 13:33 UTC 2001 |
Our current contract runs until 7/15, so we have until 6/15 if we want to
negotiate a different deal. (The contract automatically renews for another
year unless we give them 30 days notice.) We've passed the point where they
could tell us that they are raising our rates, so if we go with the one-year
contract we're locked in at $135/month. Is that still a good rate?
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gull
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response 70 of 176:
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May 25 21:46 UTC 2001 |
Well, so far Covad hasn't made fuckedcompany.com except for a comment
that their employees have been told not to expect raises or bonuses this
year.
For my home connection I went with the biggest company I could find for
DSL -- Ameritech. I figure that way I'll stave off losing my connection
as long as possible. DSL seems to be a money-losing technology, so I
expect even they will bail out eventually, but it'll be nice while it
lasts.
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aruba
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response 71 of 176:
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May 26 03:37 UTC 2001 |
(Just to clarify for everyone: our ISP is CoreComm, not Covad. I gather
that CoreComm gets its feed from Covad, though, so if Covad goes under we're
in trouble.)
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scg
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response 72 of 176:
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May 26 04:45 UTC 2001 |
CoreComm is the ISP. Covad is the phone company Grex uses to connect to the
ISP. If Covad goes under, Grex will have no DSL line. If CoreComm goes
under, Grex can easily have the DSL line connected to another ISP.
Saying a company has "six quarters left of cash" is somewhat deceptive. That
generally includes operating at at least the current rate of incoming cash,
and is a best case scenario even then. However, once a company appears to
be in that sort of trouble, convincing customers to sign up with a company
they don't believe will be around in a year or two can be a hard sell.
Furtheremore, borrowing money or recruiting new investors becomes very
difficult as well. Grex needs to be prepared for Covad to go away, and needs
a backup plan.
There's nothing wrong with DSL as a technology, but given what the RBOCs are
charging the DSL CLECs (companies like Covad) for copper pairs, what the CLECs
are charging the ISPs for the DSL lines, and what the RBOCs are charging for
their own DSL service (which the ISPs have to compete with), the business
model for non-RBOC owned ISPs selling DSL service has become one of "losing
money on every sale, but making it up in volume." It's not sustainable.
My prediction is that Covad will be bought by one of the RBOCs at pennies on
the dollar, rather than being allowed to die. However, I predicted that for
Northpoint (one of Covad's competitors) as well, and they instead went out
of business and cut off their customer connections very suddenly. There's
a fairly strong possibility that Covad will do the same thing.
Really, at this point, Grex needs to be looking at colocation. Everything
Grex needs to run should fit into the Sun 4/690 rack in the Pumpkin, so the
current mess that gets used as an argument against that isn't an issue. My
understanding is that the staff just managed to go three months without easy
access to the Pumpkin, so that isn't much of an issue either. Grex's hardware
problems last weekend were caused by a disk getting coated with a thick layer
of dust, showing yet another reason why Grex needs to be in a cleaner
environment than the Pumpkin.
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mdw
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response 73 of 176:
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May 26 05:31 UTC 2001 |
Grex staff also didn't do any backups for 3 months. It was shear luck
that didn't bite us too badly. I have yet to meet the machine room that
was so squeaky clean *no* dust got on equipment. You need a "white
room" for that, and I don't know of any colocation facility that offers
such space. I also don't know of any colocation facility that would
allow us to store "spare" equipment.
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scg
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response 74 of 176:
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May 26 07:21 UTC 2001 |
I'm guessing the Pumpkin probably hasn't been vacumed in close to five years.
I know of no colo facilities that come anywhere close to the amout of mess
that is in that room. Last time I saw the Pumpkin, it was not only full of
dust, but had gotten to the point of being a pretty severe fire hazard.
Spare equipment is a red herring. Most of the equipment in the Pumpkin is
ancient stuff that Grex will never have any use for, and will presumably have
to get rid of to avoid paying taxes on it. What little is useful could
easily sit in somebody's basement, or for the truly paranoid about neutrality,
in a storage locker. What makes you think a colo facility would have a
problem with somebody doing backups? They might even have somebody there who
would be willing to swap tapes.
Anyhow, if you're not ordering some sort of redundant non-Covad connectivity
into the Pumpkin, you at least need some colo space lined up as an emergency
backup, or Grex will spend a long time off the Net if anything happens to
Covad.
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mdw
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response 75 of 176:
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May 26 07:50 UTC 2001 |
We've done the 'someone's basement' thing before. Generally, this is an
intolerable nuisance for the victim when it actually comes time to claim
the stuff. Grex stuff could be divided into the following classes:
<1> equipment actually in use
<2> spare equipment duplicating what's in use
<3> backups, documentation and other stuff
<4> future hardware being tested or worked on before placing
in service
<5> donations or cheap acquisitions that we hope will turn
into 4,2,1.
<6> old stuff, such as equipment that was either in use,
or became obselete before we figured out how to use it
<7> stuff to put other stuff on, including shelves, desk, chairs.
Of these 7 classes, a colo location will generally only take 1. Even 1
may be limited - the grex "console" might have to become a laptop that
is used on the floor in front of the machine, for instance.
Documentation - too bad, it will have to live in people's heads.
Backups live at various people's houses. A nuisance, but thank god
backups are physically small, and only the newest one is actually
useful. Future hardware - have to become much more dependent on one-man
shows - no more shared undertakings, or the leisure to spend 6 months
porting all the software to a new hardware platform. Donations or cheap
acquisitions - forget it; plan on purchasing *new* hardware instead,
spending more money, and probably being more vulnerable to vandals. Old
stuff - well, there, at least, the tax vultures will have nothing to
pick on.
Actually, if someone has a cheap 386 laptop or two they'd like to donate
to grex, we really could use it as the console.
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aruba
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response 76 of 176:
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May 26 21:08 UTC 2001 |
Re #72: Thanks for the correction, Steve. If Covad goes under and we
couldn't connect to CoreComm, would we still be obligated to pay out our
CoreComm contract? I'm guessing no, because we don't pay anything directly
to Covad, only to CoreComm.
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scg
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response 77 of 176:
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May 26 21:21 UTC 2001 |
Most colo spaces I've been in have a table or two available to pull up and
put the laptop being used as a console on while doing work. For the most
part, though, it makes a lot more sense for the console to be something
remotely accessable, so that people don't have to go on site whenever
console access is needed. There are plenty of other solutions to
documentation storage rather than having it in peoples' heads, and Grex
certainly wouldn't be the first organization to run into such issues.
Backups shouldn't be onsite, although I suppose a colo arrangement where
somebody else was swapping tapes might increase the likelyhood that they
could be stored locally.
Perhaps an office somewhere is useful for shared work on new hardware. When
is the last time that was done? When is the next time it's planned? Perhaps
some cheap office space could be found when needed, or the Pumpkin could be
used for that purpose if it's considered worth spending money on.
Alternatively, setting up the new hardware somewhere with a remote console
would satisfy most of the software installation needs.
Items six and seven on your list would become irrellevant. Item five is
certainly something that could be stored somewhere other than an office.
Anyhow, the objections to doing anything about Grex's situation are getting
old. Grex's current Net connectivity will go away in a hurry if Covad goes
out of business, and there will be no quick way to replace it. Computer and
networking equipment can and does catch on fire, often even continuing to
function while burning, such that an environment like the Pumpkin with nobody
around and no fire suppression system, the Pumpkin and its contents could
disappear quickly without warning. The extremely hot conditions in that
room, and all the dust and loose papers that the room is full of, don't help
Grex's chances there. We've now had one serious system problem directly
attributable to the dust, and who knows how many of our past problems have
been caused by the temperature. Do you have any other suggestions for how
to solve these problems, especially that of network connectivity?
My strong impression is that nobody is doing any thinking about the network
connectivity issue. The impression I've gotten from the rest of the staff
when there have been network connectivity problems recently is that it's seen
as my problem, and even getting somebody else to make a phone call to Grex's
ISP took weeks. I live 2300 miles away. There is nothing I can do for Grex
from this distance concerning network connectivity. Grex is very low on my
priority list at this point, and I'm certainly not going to get on a plane
to go deal with it, nor am I interested in continuing to be seen as
responsible for something I don't have access to. Somebody else needs to
take this over and become concerned about it, if Grex is going to last. If
Grex goes away or drops off the Net, I'll be sad, but I'll probably find more
interesting things to do with my time. There's nothing I can do from this
distance to save it.
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scg
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response 78 of 176:
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May 26 21:21 UTC 2001 |
(Mark slipped in. I'm not a lawyer, but I assume that if CoreComm is no
longer providing the service, you no longer have to pay for the service)
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aruba
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response 79 of 176:
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May 26 21:31 UTC 2001 |
I cleaned up the loose papers in the Pumpkin today, and I'll vacuum
tomorrow.
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scg
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response 80 of 176:
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May 26 21:36 UTC 2001 |
Thanks.
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devnull
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response 81 of 176:
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May 27 01:30 UTC 2001 |
Re #75: I would expect that if there's new hardware being set up,
software work could probably be done by it being put on a ``barrowed''
net connection while it's being set up.
Having the console of a machine be remotely accessible and having
remote powercycling is nice regardless of whether you're in colo.
(I've set up remote powercycling and console access for hardware both
at the FSF's main office in Boston, and for a machine they have in
colo; at 9PM, when everyone in the office has gone home, it might as
well be in colo as far as I'm concerned, not wanting to spend 45
minutes each way to go into the office.) Indeed, if a laptop were
found that had two serial ports and could have an ethernet port
installed, that might be ideal for use for a console for grex.
Re #77: I haven't found tables being really available at either of the
colo places I've dealt with installing hardware at, but I'm sure this
varies.
I am curious what the costs are of all the problems that mdw talks
about vs the savings in rent.
Whether backups can be done by the colo facility depends on the colo
facility. Many see backups as a premium service they can sell to make
more money. Global NAPS certainly doesn't want to do backups for
their customers, and I don't remember Level 3 being especially anxious
to run your backups for you, although I'm not sure I was paying enough
attention.
Is there any useful colo around Ann Arbor? If the price of colo in
Chicago was right, would it be worth the trip?
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gull
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response 82 of 176:
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May 27 17:37 UTC 2001 |
Detroit Free Press, Saturday, May 26, 2001.
(Trimmed a bit for brevity.)
Michigan may lose ailing DSL link
Jeff Bennett, Free Press Business Writer
Michiganders are in danger of losng one of few choices for high-speed
Internet service after auditors of Covad Communications warned Friday that
it is in serious financial trouble.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is the third-largest high-speed
Internet access provider in Michigan.
Customers connect to the Covad network when they purchase Internet service
through Big Net Inc. of Pontiac. It supplies high-speed Internet service to
12,000 Michigan residents and businesses through DSL, or digital subscriber
telephone lines.
But Covad reported a fourth quarter loss of $907.5 million Friday, sending
its stock down 19.8 percent to close at $1.01.
The DSL network blamed its financial woes on partners that sold its service
but couldn't pay their bills, and technical problems caused by rapid growth.
If Covad folds, it would be another blow to Michigan, which is trying to
foster the expansion of broadband services in order to meet business
demands.
In April, 2,500 to 5,000 Michigan customers were left in high-speed limbo
after NorthPoint Communciations pulled the plug on its 100,000 mostly
business customers nationwide.
...
Duane Rao, founder of Big Net, said he's trying to connect any new customers
who buy Internet service from his company to another DSL network.
Big Net's top choice for that is SBC Communications, the San Antonio-based
telecommunications giant that owns Ameritech, Michigan's biggest local phone
company.
SBC already owns 6 percent of Covad, and Rao would like to see it buy the
rest of the company and pick up service for all his existing customers.
...
If that does not happen and Covad goes bankrupt, Rao said he is sure another
company would step in to maintain service for his customers. But that could
mean changes in hardware or Internet addresses for customers.
"We are waiting to see what happens but we are not going to be another
NorthPoint," Rao said. "The big difference between NorthPoint and Covad is
that Covad has 350,000 customers nationwide."
That makes Covad more likely to be bought and not just shut down, like
Northpoint.
SBC officials could not be reached for comment.
If the company buys Covad, it would leave the state with two major networks
providing high-speed Internet service. They would be:
- SBC, whose DSL service would be sold through Ameritech, Qwest
Communications, and Big Net.
- Comcast, which sells high-speed access over its cable systems.
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gull
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response 83 of 176:
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May 27 17:39 UTC 2001 |
Sounds like it's time to seriously consider colocation, or switching to
Ameritech for DSL. Those would appear to be the only choices. The company
I work for recently ordered an SDSL line from Ameritech (not for its main
connectivity, but for a project at another site.) I can find out from my
boss what the rate is, but it's for a single machine so it probably wouldn't
be directly applicable to Grex's situation.
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scg
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response 84 of 176:
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May 27 20:03 UTC 2001 |
(In fairness to Michigan, Covad's problems have nothing to do with Michigan,
and certainly won't hit Michigan any harder than they hit anywhere else. The
slant of the Free Press article is odd.)
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gull
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response 85 of 176:
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May 28 01:41 UTC 2001 |
I thought so too. I think the point they're trying to make is that it's a
bit of a blow considering that Michigan is struggling to attract hi-tech
industries, and considering that there are so few network providers here.
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rksjr
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response 86 of 176:
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Jun 3 01:57 UTC 2001 |
What would be the ramifictions of joining with other Covad
customers to form a "not-for-profit DSL provider co-op"?
If the management of Covad could be persuaded to provide
Grex with Covad's DSL customer list, then inquiries could be
sent to Covad's DSL customers asking if they would be
willing to join together in forming a "not-for-profit DSL
co-op".
If there are enough positive responses from the inquiries
sent to the customers of Covad, then each prospective co-op
member would buy one "co-op share" of the prospective DSL
co-op, and then the accumulated funds would be used to buy
Covad's DSL operation.
Conceivably the expense of participating with other
customers of Covad in the purchase and running of Covad's
DSL operation as a co-op, could be considerably less than
what Grex is presently paying indirectly to Covad for DSL
service, given that Covad's stock price has dipped as low as
it has. [1]
Electric power co-ops are surviving [2,3]; why couldn't a
DSL co-op thrive?
I don't know anything about establishing and/or running a
DSL provider co-op, but if any other Grexers do, then here
is your opportunity.
Notes
[Note 1.]
"...Covad stock is down to $1.03/share, down 98%
from its 52-week peak." [from response #17 by (krj);
Apr 7, 2001; source cited:
http://www.upside.com/Rex_Crum/3ac9e9aa30d.html]
[Note 2.]
[Periodical article title:] Great service. (includes
related article) (electric cooperatives) Mark Janick.
Electrical World, Jan-Feb 2001 v215 i1 p47(3).
[online database:] InfoTrac EF
[InfoTrac online abstract:]
Issues concerning the standard of services provided
by electric cooperatives are discussed. It is
emphasized that electric cooperatives offer better
protection of their customers' interests. Several
examples of cooperatives are used to prove the benefits
of the industry.
[Note 3.]
To provide a balanced view regarding the success of
electric co-operatives, I am including a brief excerpt of
an article which is somewhat pessimistic regarding the
future of rural electric co-operatives:
[Article title:] Cross-country co-operation. (rural
electric cooperatives vs investor-owned utilities)
(American Survey) (Brief Article) The Economist (US), May
3, 1997 v342 n8015 p22(1).[online database:] InfoTrac EF
[Excerpt:]
Rural co-ops stretch out over 73% of the land mass,
have $60 billion in assets and serve 30m people in 46
states. But according to Lester Thurow, a professor of
economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the keynote speaker at the National Rural Electric
Co-operative Association's annual meeting in Las Vegas,
their competitive advantage over private power companies
has probably gone.
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