[Thermodyne]

T-1’s Yuck.

Frames, ATM’s, relays, svc’s, pvc’s; its all so simple until the phone company screws it up to maximize billing. Every time it blows up, it’s from one lata to the next. And every time you turn around, there is a new lata that has to be crossed, for a fee of course. I think we have 46 T-1 circuits and a pair of T-3 at work now, and all in all they work well. Other than weather related problems, most of the outages are because the phone company changes the provisioning at one end and never gets the word out to the other end. Have to watch the actual through put too; they tend to try to sell 3mg on 1.5mg circuits.

I live out on the fringe of the DC urban area, just a little past where the endless city stops, so back in the day it was dialup at about 20k actual, or ISDN. So I got a 128k ISDN line pulled and it was not too bad. Then the beast from New York bought out the local phone company. The ISDN bill was an inch thick! ISDN is timed, so I had it set up to drop the connection if idle for more than 90 seconds. When it negotiates a new connection, there is an 8 step handshake and authentication process IIRC, well to make a long story short, they were billing me 11 minutes for an 8 second connection negotiation. They billed me 34 hours in one 24 hour period. I had the server set up to connect on demand and lots of stuff running off the scheduler. I almost died when I got that first bill from them! It went from about $60 to over a $1000. I could have had a T-1 for what they billed me! Then I put a dish in, and regretted it from day one. I needed good weather here and good weather in Atlanta too. Then the county made me buy a license, because the dish was over 4 feet in diameter. Then they made me mount it 14 feet off the ground, because it was a radiation hazard. The damn thing never was reliable, every time they had storms in Atlanta; (every damn summer day and night I think) it dropped off line. At first, it wouldn’t work if it was just heavy clouds here, but I had a guy rework the transmit horn and he solved that problem. He suggested that I never ever stand in front of it after that too. It’s still up there and can still track the satellite. Every now and again I find a transponder that I can use, but with the cable service I seldom need it.