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:
| Days | Hours | Minutes | Percent | Min Down | Hours Down |
| 30 | 720 | 43200 | 99 | 432 | 7.2 |
| 30 | 720 | 43200 | 99.9 | 43.2 | 0.72 |
| 30 | 720 | 43200 | 99.99 | 4.32 | 0.072 |
| 30 | 720 | 43200 | 99.999 | 0.432 | 0.0072 |
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:
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…