Friday, April 07, 2006
Verizon owes me 1365 years of perfect service
My phone line has been out -- completely out, no dial tone -- for 2 days since I discovered and reported the outage. If "five nines" were a guarantee, that is, if it had any reality to it at all, I could expect 100,000 days, or 274 years, of perfect service for each day my phone were out, or 548 years total.
Unfortunately, Verizon is still working off the remaining 817 years of a three-day outage (822 years!) five years ago. So I figure that they owe me 548+817=1365 years of perfect service. Or they would if "five nines" were more than hot air.
Somebody please check my math -- I've been known to make stupid mistakes. But if I'm right, or even close, it looks like Verizon is not even making 3 nines, i.e. one day kaput for every 1000 normal days.
Fortunately, other options are available. I have a cell phone and a my wife's line and Skype (which can use either of two Internet connections). So if each of my five telephony systems is out one day in 1000, and if there are no common points of failure among them, that is, if outages are independent events, then the probability of me being totally without telephony is .000000000000001 -- 15 nines. It's a good argument for facilities-based competition, indeed, for multi-modal facilities-based competition. [I first made this argument in an essay entitled Buy as Many Nines as You Need, which was published in Business Communications Review.]
Unfortunately, Verizon is still working off the remaining 817 years of a three-day outage (822 years!) five years ago. So I figure that they owe me 548+817=1365 years of perfect service. Or they would if "five nines" were more than hot air.
Somebody please check my math -- I've been known to make stupid mistakes. But if I'm right, or even close, it looks like Verizon is not even making 3 nines, i.e. one day kaput for every 1000 normal days.
Fortunately, other options are available. I have a cell phone and a my wife's line and Skype (which can use either of two Internet connections). So if each of my five telephony systems is out one day in 1000, and if there are no common points of failure among them, that is, if outages are independent events, then the probability of me being totally without telephony is .000000000000001 -- 15 nines. It's a good argument for facilities-based competition, indeed, for multi-modal facilities-based competition. [I first made this argument in an essay entitled Buy as Many Nines as You Need, which was published in Business Communications Review.]
Technorati Tags: Competition, statistics, Verizon
Comments:
If "five nines" were a guarantee, that is, if it had any reality to it at all, I could expect 100,000 days, or 274 years, of perfect service for each day my phone were out, or 548 years total.
I understand you're angry, but this is a silly position to take. Nobody at Verizon promises 5 nines for an individual line. They don't promise it at all for residential lines, but they very well may have done it anyway. It seems quite believable they have delivered the expected 100K line-days that gives them an overall 99.999% availability, but it's split among the 300 customers that have not had a problem this year.
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If "five nines" were a guarantee, that is, if it had any reality to it at all, I could expect 100,000 days, or 274 years, of perfect service for each day my phone were out, or 548 years total.
I understand you're angry, but this is a silly position to take. Nobody at Verizon promises 5 nines for an individual line. They don't promise it at all for residential lines, but they very well may have done it anyway. It seems quite believable they have delivered the expected 100K line-days that gives them an overall 99.999% availability, but it's split among the 300 customers that have not had a problem this year.
# posted by 
: 4/07/2006 12:03 PM
: 4/07/2006 12:03 PM
