Understanding Service Levels, or not!
On Friday, a press release landed in my mailbox which made me ask exactly what do people expect from low cost services. It contains a quote from an individual describing himself as a “business owner” who had a problem with his broadband service provider who was in dispute with its supplier. Apparently he operates an “Internet retail business” and says that his business would have gone under if his broadband service had been down for six weeks.
This is where I have a problem.. How can a business have no contingency plans in place to cope with a fairly sizeable risk that a single broadband connection could be down for an extended time period? Are they hosting their website on the end of their £10.99 DSL line? If you run a business which is so dependent on your connection, then get a leased line, or at least multiple broadband connections with different providers, and ideally different technologies.
December 15th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Being on the “receiving” end of technical support, I’m often faced with people who demand that the level of service is modified to be of a higher priority because they depend on their computer for whatever reason.
A number of people seem to purchase computers targeted at home users, and then complain because they use them for business and need it fixed quickly.
Others find it difficult to accept that, in the case of hard drive failure, all data on the drive has been lost. Again, often these people use their computer for business purposes, and have often never heard of the term “backup”.
Going back to the main blog entry though, I do know people who have more than one broadband connection and depend on it for business use, but the connections are with the same ISP, which often has problems affecting both connections…