| What the
Hurricanes Have Taught Us South Florida got pounded by Hurricane Frances. Southwest Florida got pounded by Charley. Both left many without power, phones or cable. In South Florida LATA, BellSouth's Outage site had over 2500 circuits listed as down after Frances. DSL was down for almost a week in some areas. Many businesses lost opportunities and money. DSL does not have an SLA. Voice has a mandated repair time of ASAP. Next comes DS3 and above; then T1 service (even with the SLA of 4 hours mean time to begin repair). So DSL comes after all that. Last place. This is another demonstration of Build Your Own Network. Even if it is one or two cells, isn't better to have two small profit centers than to have 500 DSL customers? (Some of you will say no. Those that said No can turn the page, you won't like the rest of this either). If you had clients with your voice service, those patrons would be STEAMED! Good reason to use T1 service for VOIP or your own Network. (Also, a good reason to sell the client an Asterisk box so he can still get still use the internal phone system and forward calls to cell or home phones. VOIP Providers will want to give some attention to the following: - UPS systems to keep the PBX and IAD up - Power over Ethernet devices - Back-up POTS lines and cell phones - Full disclosure with customers about outages and x11 services - New CPE hitting the market with fail-over - Off-site mirror service; backup/archiving  Let's say that you are doing Home Brew VOIP with an Asterisk server and a CLEC's PRI. The CLEC is taking the customer's numbers, porting them to your PRI. Then along comes a bankruptcy filing (coming soon to a CLEC near you). What happens to all your customers' numbers? Good question. Something that better be discussed with your CLEC beforehand (despite the protests that bankruptcy is not in the cards - that's what MCI and Enron said). This situation should be spelled out in the User Agreement along with the x11 services.  Be Prepared. Spell it all out for the Customer upfront. Now go sell. |
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