Keeping It Up: Do Service Providers Need a Dose of Viagra?

I shouldn’t complain. I’m healthy. I have a great family. Nice home. Good job. Still, this morning has not been the best.

Sitting down to start work this morning in my home office I noticed my cable modem was down, which for me means no phone (I have an IP phone that runs through the cable connection) and no access to the Internet, my files or calendar (as I use a thin client). That’s a problem, considering I had a couple of important meetings this morning and several deadlines.

So I called my friendly IT guy Aaron, who got the times and numbers off my Outlook calendar, and I used my cell phone in an attempt to reach my meetings — which, of course, were supposed to call me on my IP phone today — and let them know to instead reach me on my cell. Of course, I had to make seven calls just to connect with my 9:30 a.m. appointment. But we connected, so I was happy, although not too relaxed.

While trying to connect with the PR rep who set up my 9:30, I headed to the local Coffee Plantation to connect my laptop to their free Wi-Fi. But, luck as it was for me this morning, all the tables and electrical connections were spoken for. So I went to the local library to connect. For some reason I couldn’t get the Wi-Fi going, so I ended up having to root around under all the tables to find the last remaining Ethernet cable in the joint. Two-and-a-half hours after starting my day, I am finally connected and ready to go. Not my most productive day.

I’m sure many of you have had days like this, when technical difficulties got in the way of work and caused frustration and perhaps even missed meetings and/or lost revenue opportunities.

While we hear a lot from service providers about how competitive they are and how many choices there are in the market, the fact is many of us have very limited choices and the reliability of many of these services is less than you might expect in a day and age where we never stop hearing about the new trend of anytime, anywhere communications.

Certainly, communications have become a must-have in most of our personal and work lives. But what’s not there yet — whether we’re talking about cell service, broadband access (even for those of us who have affordable access to it) or even cable TV service (Did I mention my electronic programming guide was not working last night and that this morning my cable TV is out?) — is anything close to 100 percent uptime.

I was talking about just that issue earlier this week during a visit I made to see Jim Lawrence, chief software standards officer at ENEA, a real-time operating system and middleware supplier.

The question for service providers, Lawrence said, is whether there’s an advantage to the business model based on providing 100 percent uptime, or whether the current state of services is good enough.

Interesting question. I’d love to hear your input on this issue.

This editorial, which originally appeared as a blog on xchange’s Web site in January, received so much response that we decided to rerun it here.

Until next time,

Paula Bernier
Editor in Chief

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