I do not think occasional outages cause significant loss of customers. Customers get angry easily, but once an issue is fixed, they get happy quickly. Customers have very short memories and the cost and hassle of changing services is often significant. Outages are never good, but it is better to concentrate on fixing the issue than panic about customers canceling their service.
Many times the cause of an outage is totally out of your control. For example, most of our outages are caused by Verizon's aging and neglected copper cable plant. I often wish some company had the balls to file a class action lawsuit over Verizon's neglect of their copper plant, but NOBODY wants to piss off their ILEC, including us. -----Original Message----- From: Diogo Montagner [mailto:diogo.montag...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 8:32 PM To: Darius Jahandarie; Murat Yuksel; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: cost of misconfigurations Hi Darius, You are right. The lost of a customer due to those things. However, I would classify this as an unknown situation (in terms of risk analisys) because the others I mentioned are possible to calculate and estimate (they are known). But it is very hard to estimate if a customer will cancel the contract because 1 or n network outages. In theory, if the customer SLA is not being met consecutively, there is a potential probability he will cancel the contract. Regards On 8/2/12, Darius Jahandarie <djahanda...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:08 PM, Diogo Montagner > <diogo.montag...@gmail.com> wrote: >> A misconfiguration will, at least, impact on two points: network >> outage and re-work. For the network outage, you have to use the SLAs >> to calculate the cost (how much you lost from the customers' revenue) >> due to that outage. On the other hand, there is the time efforts >> spent to fix the misconfiguration. Under the fix, it could be >> removing the misconfig and applying a new one correct. Or just fixing >> the misconfig targeting the correct config. This re-work will >> translate in time, and time can be translated in money spent. > > Isn't the largest cost omitted (or at least glossed over) here? > Namely, lost customers due to the outage. That's why people have SLAs > and rework the network at all -- to avoid that cost. > > > -- > Darius Jahandarie > -- Sent from my mobile device ./diogo -montagner JNCIE-SP 0x41A
