How reliable is your internet provider, or webhost provider?

Many years ago during my Microware era, I had some outsider exposure to the wireless communications industry. This was a long time ago. Cellular phones were still mostly analog, other than the GSM network. (After a layoff, I spent about a year selling cellphones from a now-defunct “leader in wireless activations” and I think it was VoiceStream or something that had GSM phones in our area. Few customers wanted them because the digital coverage was pretty limited to just large cities at the time.)

But I digress.

A term I learned was “five nines”. This was a level of reliability expected out of these cell phone towers. Five nines is 99.999%.

Do all those extra decimal places really matter? We were told that even promoting 99% was terrible, and 99.% still was problematic if the service was important.

This stuck with me, and years later I would see claims of reliability from high-speed internet providers (initial cable modems for my area; I had the first install of one in my neighborhood, but that’s a story for another time). 99% sounded great to me, but the reality was … less great.

To help you visualize how reliable “99%” is, I made this spreadsheet:

You can see that a service offering 99% uptime would be down over 7 hours per month.

At 99.9%, you only lose 43 minutes per month. Much better. Clearly, an extra decimal place goes a long way.

And the industry standard of “five nines” would allow a service to have less than 30 seconds downtime in a month.

Here is the wikipedia page that discusses this, with even more stats:

High availability – Wikipedia

With that in mind, what do you think the uptime is of your high-speed internet provider? :) And what do they claim?

Until next time…

As I drove to work one morning, I noticed some interesting abbreviations being used on my traffic report phone app. (I’d normally say “GPS app” but then folks always say “you need your GPS to get to work?” No, it’s not about navigation. It’s about traffic reports, police incidents, closed exits and other things.)

But I digress…

In America, “m” is an abbreviation for “miles.” For example, mpg (miles per gallon) and mph (miles per hour).

“m” is also an abbreviation for meters, as in mps (meters per second) or 3m (three meters).

When I see “5m” I assume this is meters.

But “m” is also an abbreviation for minutes. If you see this:

4h3m30s

That clearly looks like hours, minutes and seconds. And if someone sends a text saying:

BwoopyBob: be there in 3m

…that seems to mean minutes.

Context is everything.

My navigation app shows speed, distance and time. All of these things are “m” words: miles per hour, miles to go, and minutes until arrival.

So naturally, they have to alter the abbreviations.

Minutes is shortened to “min”, which we usually assume means minutes or minimum, and miles is “mi” since, I assume, the app also supports metric distances and would use “m” for that. And miles per hour is displayed as “mph” as I’d expect.

I wonder what other “m” units are displayed by this thing?

• m
• mi
• min
• mpg

Seeing one alone is not enough to understand what the “m” means, and even having a numeric unit may not help… Is 30m thirty miles or thirty minutes or thirty meters? Or something else?

I guess my point is, when abbreviating, always add context. Your users/readers will appreciate it.

Until next time…