Matthouse

99.9% uptime

After being out sick since Saturday, and coming back today to find 687 unread items in my RSS feed integrator, I found an interesting post on Slashdot, entitled “Why is Less Than 99.9% Uptime Acceptable?”. Within the first sentance, the original poster mentiones five-nine’s (99.999% instead of the three-nine’s (99.9%) listed in the subject, but I digress.

The original article asks the same basic question:  Why do we put up with availability of 99.9% (which they say (I didn’t do the math to check it) translates to about 3 and a half days a year) , or even 99% out of our cellular, internet, and other “new technology” communication services, when we have demanded 99.999% (5 minutes per year) availability from our traditional phone service?

The answer is right there in the article…  Traditional phone service is regulated as a monopoly utility by the Federal Communications Commission and the Public Utilities Commission, just like the power and gas utilities; cellular and internet services are not.  This regulation was put in place for a very good reason:  prior to 1986 (and lets face it, even today in much of the US), there was only one place to get traditional phone service: the phone company.  So, being a monopoly, they could have just taken customers’ money and delivered shoddy service (see the old Saturday Night Live episode, “We don’t care, we’re the phone company), so the government stepped in and said “You must deliver service availability of 99.999%, or face fines.”  New technologies like cellular and internet, which are rapidly turning old-school telephones into museum pieces, have no such regulations.  They can do whatever they want, within reason (Net Nutrality and other issues aside).

Because these new services are competition based, instead of monopolies, they don’t need to be regulated by the government.  If a particular service provider is providing bad service, the market will make sure they aren’t a service provider for very long (customers will find another carrier).  If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happening to Sprint-Nextel.

So if a particular cellular carrier wants to advertise the fewest dropped calls, well, that’s fine with me, as long as they can back up their claims.  It a free-market economy, in which competition drives prices, the companies will do whatever they have to do to keep customers happy.  Put another way, if customers don’t mind the occasional dropped call, the service will never have availability of five-nines, and that’s fine with me.