Yahoo! Pipes a strong argument for building your own tool/buying a paid product, in that if one relies too heavily on a service and it went away, then that [business] process went away as well. The demise of Pipes! caused us a bit of anxiety and made us hustle to find other solutions in a compressed time frame.
The rather quick demise of Yahoo! Groups was also disruptive. Heck, even Hacker News could have worked as a Yahoo! Group. Fortunately, it is not. When Groups went away, so did a lot of discussion groups and even when those groups moved, they lost many members. Groups.io is a nice alternative, but there too much of their platform is free.
There is always a danger when you build critical things on someone else's land, particularly if they allow you on their property for free. Even if they charge you but are not profitable, there is a risk of waking up to read that the service is closing.
We use Zapier in our small business, but work to build out tools for those Zaps! that become mission critical.
August 2014 I was taking suitcases out of a vehicle and a few days later found myself in so much pain that I threw up while trying to get out of bed. Went the physical therapy and steroid route. Not very much results. To the point that three months later I bent down to pick up a piece of paper and could not get up. After 45 minutes of laying on the floor swearing in pain my daughter called 911 and I took the first ambulance ride of my life. I walk 5 miles a day, but for two months could not walk from my bedroom to the kitchen.
I have collapsed disk at L2/L3 and to a slightly lesser extent L4. Four doctors said surgery was the only answer. I went to that many trying to find a different answer as I had heard so many stories of failed back operations. Plus a few years ago a 25 year old kid that worked for me went in for “minor” back surgery. He left St Francis Hospital in a hearse. They cut a blood vessel, did not realize it and he internally bleed to death.
Instead of surgery I went with steroid injections in my back and a chiropractor. Both helped somewhat. The chiropractor suggested I try Yoga. Weird thing for a socially conservative midwestern kid (who is now 60), but at that point I’d try anything.
Yoga saved me. I started with restorative and now do mixed level. I can now keep up with many of the guys 20 plus years younger than me. A friend had a bad back since a car accident a decade ago. I convinced him to try Yoga and he has had similar positive results.
Is my back perfect now? No, but probably close to what it was before I realized it was damaged
"I think the consensus in the grown-up business world is 'fire immediately for cause.'" Concurring that this is the correct answer.
I make this statement from the perspective of having employees since 1979 in multiple concurrent businesses. If they have no respect at the beginning they will have less respect next week.
You must choose between your business and the new guy. In a year, you will have one or neither.
Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations.
Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our remote database services from that location. All port 80 traffic was fine. I had one of the staff call, wait on hold for an hours.
Just as I suspected Comcast had implemented port blocking on a high priced business account. It took the guy a second to release it. It put our company down for two to three hours.
Also the speed of Comcast service drops to 15-20% of advertised from 2:30 to 5 PM when kids arrive home from school.
Once the contract is up we are moving the service to someone who understands "business class"
The same thing happened to us recently. I can't remember which port they blocked, but it took out rubygems, bitbucket and github in all of Utah.
It took a while before someone finally figured it out and word spread on Twitter. I'm sure hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of productivity were lost that day.
This change is also required when sbux moves to using Google internet. I was scratching my head when it worked one week and then stopped working the next.
And that is the root of the problem. Normally when a business has the kind of terrible customer service and can't-be-bothered attitude, I just take my business elsewhere. But in the last 15 years I've never had a real choice what to use for Internet service. A couple of places I've lived I've had one additional choice that was even worse. Lack of choice and diversity in Internet providers is the problem here. I'm not sure what the root of that problem is, but I suspect it's governmental corruption and lobbying to maintain status quo.
The root of the problem is the legal difference between POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), which has been around a long time, and broadband, which came much later and had the POTS environment as an example of what to avoid (from the POV of Comcast and their ilk).
The old dialup ISPs were allowed to resell internet service on the local provider's POTS lines. There was quite a lot of competition, and the service was generally excellent, even generally better than the carrier's.
There is no requirement for broadband providers like Comcast to allow resellers. The barrier to entry for laying other broadband lines is huge; Google is one of the few who can do it. So unless there's a quantum leap in wireless to the curb, there will be no meaningful competition to amoral corporations like Comcast; we're stuck and it will continue to suck.
The real root of the problem is lack of regulation. A scarce resource like the last mile copper and cable, is owned by the oligopoly of Comcast, AT&T and a few others. This constitutes in essence a monopoly, which are illegal for obvious reasons and led to the breakup of the old AT&T. Other countries have a last-mile sharing requirement, like for example in Germany. This provides at least a modicum of competition and consumer choice in the ISP market.
[EDIT] Corrected wrong assumption that old AT&T was government owned.
Yep. I have the choice of Comcast or AT&T, the latter of which only recently got competitive in the speed category. I was with AT&T for many years, before my current 10+ year stint with Comcast. They are both horrible on customer service and IT (managing their own infrastructure). It's really a toss up as to which is worse.
I know Google fiber will never come to the East Bay (SF area). It would be so nice to have, though.
It's really a mix of over-regulation and under-regulation, with a lot of regulatory capture. In this case the monopolies are not illegal, they're actually protected by regulation.
The root problem is that telecommunications is similar to utilities in that it is a natural monopoly.
Basically imagine if someone owned the only bridge into San Francisco. They could charge whatever people were willing to pay. But you would think if they charge too much money or scream obscenities at everyone who drives through, then someone could build another bridge and steal their customers. The problem is that if anyone builds another bridge the bridge owner could stop screaming obscenities and lower his prices. Then the second bridge could not make the return on capital. The prospective business owner and current owner know this so the status quo of one expensive and crappy bridge
remains.
Unfortunately I think this is the experience of most people in the U.S. At least in my adult life, the choice has mostly been between AT&T and Comcast. I was lucky to get 100Mbs for $50/mo for a while (obviously with a small ISP), but that was just a particular building that happened to have a point-to-point wireless setup on the roof. Now things are worse... I happen to live somewhere that actually has fiber in the ground (thanks to some federal grant the city received) but there is no service provider that uses it! I would be happy to ditch AT&T/Comcast for life if it were possible.
With all due respect, your customer service policy should be based on doing the right thing regardless of the forum, as opposed to simply responding to those who have an audience.
The data caps you've recently put into place in my market are going to effectively double my account price per month. I look forward to the day that I have other choices.
No one is blaming individual employees. Quite the opposite, in fact—they're blaming the organization for failing to address issues unless the right individual is reached.
That's been my experience, as well. In two instances (one business class, one residential), I had issues getting their construction department to actually do the work they promised until I was able to get through to the escalation department—once via Twitter, once (IIRC) on dslreports.com back when the Comcast direct forum was monitored. Once the escalation department was engaged, things moved very quickly, with them calling me almost daily with status updates.
There are clearly individuals at Comcast who care about customer service. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be the ones in charge of organizational policies and processes.
Agreed. I recently decided to give Comcast another go because my current provider has some horribly bad upstream speeds, but even with brand new service, I seem to be having issues where my connection drops 4-5 times a day. It is not too big a deal when you're trying to work from home, but it can be a massive pain in the neck when you're trying to play anything online. I've been trying to resolve this issue with their customer support but I've gotten nowhere so far and feel like I'll probably just go ahead and cancel out of the contract before my first month is up.
They do advertise that they spend millions of dollars on improving their customer support, but I've yet to see anything happen on their end. Amusingly, our Comcast business contract at work has at least a couple of issues every week, too. We only don't notice them if they are to happen over the weekend, but when CRON jobs that require internet connection haven't run over the weekend, it's easy to figure out who needs blamed.
I agree with you. I'm troubled though by this new era of customer service where the focus is on having a team of people who monitor social media for the loudest complaints and devote resources to solving those out of fear of bad PR.
I do my best (customer support is not my day job) - if you are having issues I'd encourage you to try out the tool I helped build here: https://speedexperience.xfinity.com/
Some listing of what the actual issue is would be kinda useful, even if you shove it in a collapsible div to hide it away.
I (and most people) are more likely to rage-quit and go do something else than try to navigate three layers of outsourced customer service that is designed and optimized to deflect people, waste their time, and only if they are sufficiently insistent, and border-line belligerent, maybe give them an answer more involved than "unplug your modem and plug it back in"
Yes, all of the wifi stuff we add in the future will be only possible on comcast-provided wireless gateways (XB2/XB3). We have some other nifty ideas that would use our gateways too. Most of the existing stuff I mentioned is not specific to comcast-provided devices, or wireless gateways.
At least one employee would be to blame, right? Comcast's network hasn't become sentient, and isn't actively rebelling against human businesses by shutting down random ports. At some point, someone either made an explicit decision to do this, or decided to skimp on training.
It could also be an endemic culture problem, where lots of people skimp on lots of tiny things to the point that the final performance goes down the drain. No one to blame, but everyone to blame.
> I look forward to the day that I have other choices.
Same here. They are very aware that we have no other choices. They will continue provide the least amount of service for the greatest cost until this changes.
The week after google fiber arrived in my neighborhood, my cable provider "spontaneously" decided to double my connection speed for the same price, "because we care about our customers and want them to have the best experience possible."
I had Comcast when I lived in Chicago. They basically run that city. You can't get any decent internet anywhere else. All the other providers for some reason in the city, didn't cover any neighborhood I was in.
The biggest thing I liked, moving back to Iowa was decent internet provider.
>For a CMTS port to enter the Near Congestion State, traffic flowing to or from that CMTS port must exceed a specified level (the "Port Utilization Threshold") for a specific period of time (the "Port Utilization Duration").
>Given our experience as described above, we determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. For the Port Utilization Duration, we determined that the starting point should be approximately 15 minutes
>Thus, over any 15-minute period, if an average of more than 70 percent of a port's upstream bandwidth capacity or more than 80 percent of a port's downstream bandwidth capacity is utilized, that port is determined to be in a Near Congestion State.
>For a user to enter an Extended High Consumption State, he or she must consume greater than a certain percentage of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth(the "User Consumption Threshold") for a specific length of time (the "User Consumption Duration").
>we have determined that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Threshold is 70 percent of a subscriber's provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth, and that the appropriate starting point for the User Consumption Duration is 15 minutes
> A user's traffic is released from a BE state when the user's bandwidth consumption drops below 50 percent of his or her provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for a period of approximately 15 minutes.
hmm, actually i don't think i caught how much your speeds are actually reduced.
Its throttled until you've used less than 50% of what you pay for for at least 15 minutes.
That threshold is so low specifically so that a line doesn't end up cycling between throttled and not every interval if its 79% once then 81% the next, etc.
It seems obvious to me that Comcast et al are vastly overselling beyond their capacity.
They then market these strategies as methods to ensure quality to their customers, when their customers bought a service that was misadvertised as having enough capacity for them in the first place.
Just like airlines - they sell more tickets than they have seats, because they figure they can squeeze more profit out of the people who paid for a ticket but didnt show up, then when everyone shows up, someone has to get bumped.
I believe it is that if you use more than 80% and someone else is using 60%, IF throttling occurs on the network, the person using 60% will have priority over you.
Question #1: Is the CMTS Upstream Port Utilization at an average
of OVER 70% for OVER 15 minutes?
Result #1: CMTS marked in a Near Congestion State, indicating
congestion *may* occur soon.
Action #1: Search most recent analysis timeframe (approx. 15 mins.)
of IPDR usage data.
Question #2: Are any users consuming an average of OVER 70% of
provisioned upstream bandwidth for OVER 15 minutes?
Result #2: No action taken.
Result #3: Change user's upstream traffic from Priority Best Effort
(PBE) to Best Effort (BE).
Question #3: Is the user in Best Effort (BE) consuming an average
of LESS THAN 50% of provisioned upstream bandwidth
over a period of 15 minutes?
Result #4: Change user's upstream traffic back to Priority Best
Effort (PBE) from Best Effort (BE).
What other provider choice do you have? Whoever they are, they all collude to inflict maximum pain for maximum gain - a hallmark of modern capitalism. Good luck though.
That's not my definition of modern capitalism, I call that corruption. A corruption enabled by government agencies that enforce monopolies that no consumers want to exist.
I agree that in lots of places there are franchise agreements and in others, there are specific laws that deter municipal networks.
That said, you could argue that data networks are mostly a natural monopoly because it's not feasible or efficient to roll out several redundant fiber/cable networks.
Even if there were no franchise agreements in place, very few companies (excepting ones that have other revenue streams) would roll out a second or third cable/fiber network in a city where there is already one in place. Even if you managed to split the market and get half of the potential customers, you'd need to account for the cost of digging trenches and laying cable (which cable TV companies have long since recouped). Makes it hard to stay solvent at such a disadvantage.
It's why a lot of people think the ideal situation is for a single physical network to be built and then service providers pay for access and compete on service to businesses and customers. With physical networks divorced from service providers, the company or municipality in charge of the actual cable/fiber makes their money from maintaining and improving capacity so they can sell access to more providers. Providers compete by offering the best services and customer support in order to profit and pay for more bandwidth on the physical network.
But yeah, it's more complicated (in terms of both business and networking tech) but it's an ideal that many would like to move toward.
What you describe is how the power grid where I live is handled. That's one solution I would be more interested in than these monopolies that only seem to create horrible customer service, high fees, and poor product.
But in the end, I'm not sure what's the best way to handle it. I just know that many would agree that the current methods are not optimum, and possibly detrimental.
By letting the government build and own the infrastructure, then lease the exploitation of it to private companies, and have other companies do the maintenance. This has its own challenges too, but at least the monopoly is in the hands of people who can be voted out.
This model was used regularly for rail and power networks in Europe, but these have all been privatised in the past few decades citing "cost reductions". The net result is that our infrastructure is deteriorating, consumer prices are rising way faster than inflation, and critical infrastructure is now in the hands of a few international power brokers (e.g. the Dutch national telephone grid is owned by Carlos Slim).
If that's how it came about then I would be more apt to accept that. But in the U.S., I find it doubtful any current telecommunications monopoly came to exist without government involvement. A good chunk of that upfront capital and land requirement was given away by the government for promises those companies didn't keep.
Yet, you need money from the beginning, so you are now back to issuing more bonds, and perhaps, raising capitals with venture investors. This is basically the model of the 19, 20th century railroad race. Of course the government wasn't directly building the railroad, but they were the one who gave the lands and even troops to open up the new frontiers.
Live simple, create the life you want, then live the life you created.
I spent a couple of years eating Kraft macaroni and cheese (my generation's ramen noodles) five days a week, driving a $200 car (country boy - no public transportation) and worked 12 hours a day, six days a week to get my business off the ground. For much of those two years I worked nights to buy the little we had. I had two kids at the time I quit my paycheck. I gave them more than I gave myself.
In 1981 I received the last paycheck that was signed by anyone other than myself. A year later I was living fairly comfortably. I put my kids through college with no student loans. Today I live on the ocean, have any car I want, never worry about money, travel where and when I want.
You can work to get a large paycheck, I'm sure. But in exchange for that paycheck someone else owns your life.
I am by no means smarter than most, I have no real education, no one gave me financial support in the beginning, I was just doggedly persistent in pursuing my vision.
Hangout with people who are smarter, more successful and more diligent than you. You want to be the dumb kid in the company of great rather than the top of a group of underachievers. Meetups or trade organizations are a great start. But also seek out the people in your industry that you admire the most, tell them your interest and offer to buy them lunch to hear their story.
Personally I feel that this generation's pivoting is often just giving up too soon. Decide what you want to do and then move mountains with a teaspoon if that is what it takes to make it happen. Others will disagree and they are just as right.
But if you truly want to do something, quit reading Hacker News and get on with doing the job at hand. If for no other reason than HN exposes you to a wealth of choices, which makes it harder to focus on one. Once you succeed come back and read the cool new stuff that is out there.
Is productx.com a parked name or will you be infringing on someone's copyright/trademark? If it is the former and you think you have a home run, buy the domain. If it is the latter you need a new name.
One question: Do you think HN is the best forum to seek the answer as this is mostly a tech oriented site?
Not that I have a better suggestion where to post the question.
I too focus on physical businesses. I read HN for ideas to make those businesses more effective through applying technology, but like you would love to find a similar site aimed more at physical businesses.
I feel every physical business can outperform their counter parts through use of innovative technology.
For example, recently one of our delivery trucks was misbehaving. I took it to this mechanic shop, a really old school type place, with just the shop owner and his two helpers. Pretty much as low tech as you can get.
The shop owner, who was in his seventies, was trying to diagnose the problem. It was something he had never seen before and the symptoms were not listed in any of the truck manufacturer's service bulletins that he had online access to. He logs into an online forum type site where he finds other mechanics that had the same problem with this particular model and reported their solution. His keyboard was so covered in grease that you could barely make out the letters. An hour and twenty minutes later the truck is back in service.
I asked him about the site. As part of the service he is required to report back what worked for him. He says 'I spend $100 a month for it, but it is worth ten times that.'
"- I regularly brainstorm with others in the SoFL entrepreneurial and tech circles as we look for ways to grow our community and attract talent to our market."
Tell us more...
Thanks
Tim - an entrepreneur/small biz owner who spend half his time in SoFL
There are individuals down here who are working on projects, initiatives, and events that will ultimately enrich our community down here. Co-working spaces are growing for entrepreneurs, programmers, and small business owners to get bootstrapped with resources easily. Organizers are creating engaging, educational and inspiring events that are attracting some great attention nationally. There is a need here and figuring out how to address the need is a constant discussion topic among these people.
Personally, I run the South Florida Hack and Tell (http://hackandtell.org) and we're looking to start quarterly workshops that teach a specific topic or technology. There are several who are organizing hack-a-thons and are getting the attention and support of larger companies in Silicon Valley. We have our own conference and tech week in March which has been getting bigger the past few years. Groups of us are involved in the government and city development circles and are working the bureaucratic routes.
If you're interested (I'm speaking to any South Floridian who's interested in growing this community), it's not hard to find out how to contribute to the scene down here and all it takes is getting involved. Feel free to come out to any of the events (http://miamitechevents.com) and start asking what you can do. See what other people are doing. Offer suggestions and insight on what could be done better. Be present.
Actually been a HackerNews reader/lurker for a while, but never felt compelled to post any comments until reading your post on SoFL entrepreneur groups.
We moved one business (http://EventDecoratingAcademy.com) to Miami about two years ago. We love Miami. It is a much more vibrant community than Milwaukee, where we also have businesses. I am very pro SoFL. Being in an environment like Miami helps one see possibilities you otherwise would not have seen. Some of the fun art work my wife does is at http://GotLatex.com. This work is directly a result from being in Miami.
Our current businesses have physical presence, so we are not a tech folks per se. However every business that wishes to succeed today must have a tech undercurrent/backbone. The main reason I follow HackerNews is to find new ideas for our brick and mortar type business.
I also have an interest in tech since back in the late seventies/ early eighties when I programed metal working machine tools using a teletype to make a paper punch tape to run the program. We also wrote inventory databases using dBase on CP/M machines with 8" 100k floppy drives... yes, back then a whole business could reside on 100k of data. No fancy GUI, turn the machine on a single period was displayed on a monochrome screen.
