AT&T's infamous frame relay network outage last spring was the last straw for Aaron Roberts, manager of IS at the J. Hill Group, a business consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn.
"It was a sad, sad day," says Roberts, who lost business due to the outage. His company had already been having problems with its frame relay service, so "after that point, we were gone."
When the outage occurred, Roberts says AT&T did everything it could to notify customers, but he still couldn't get past the notion that a supposedly redundant network had simply crashed.
The J. Hill Group also had minor problems concerning router configurations with AT&T's frame relay service. Initially, the routers had no passwords, so someone could have broken into the company's network by using a modem to connect to the router. "We caught it, but I was a little dismayed," Roberts says.
After the frame relay outage, Roberts decided to choose a less expensive, local data service. He settled on an ISP called gofast.net, which provides a virtual private network between the consulting firm's two locations.
"We had a problem one day where the firewall hiccuped. They had someone out in 10 minutes," he says.
RELATED LINKS
AT&T pinpoints cause of frame outage
Network World Fusion, 4/22/98.
