Frame relay outage costs AT&T a customer
By Neal Weinberg
Network World, 11/09/98
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.
This should make ATT think about switching the network to ASND, which is the industry standard.
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