Re: The OTHER problem with Netgear WGT624 (and probably others)

phil-news-nospam@xxxxxxxx hath wroth:

You're assuming that the maintenance cost is inevitable.

I'm in the maintenance business, so that's a fair assumption. I call
to your attention the large number of software and firmware, updates
and fixes.

Do you figure in the percentage probability of an expense and prorate
it across all expenditures to calculate an average cost of ownership?
Or are you assuming the worst case where everything will fail and drive
costs to a maximum?

Neither. My job was to calculate the cost of a crash and recovery,
not to predict its incidence. That's the insurance company's problem.
Please note that I suggested that you calculate the cost of a failure,
not the probability of it happening.

The ones I know of that run in the bitter edge of bankruptcy are the ones
that overspent to begin with.

There are those, I'm sure. If you look hard enough for a problem,
you're sure to find it. Most of my customers have been with me for
perhaps 15 years and have remained sufficiently profitable to pay my
exhoribitant fees. My biggest headache is currently that many of them
are retireing or selling their businesses.

Sounds like someone bought a cheap UPS.

Yep. APC BackUPS ES 350VA. Very cheap. Works well enough for power
failures, but doesn't stop the small glitches. In this case, there's
construction going on next door, which probably is causing the
glitches.

I don't always put them in,
depending on need, but where I do, I get the dual-conversion type that
are always converting AC to DC, paralleling the battery, and converting
DC back to AC, 100% of the time. I never see glitches with those.

Yep. SmartUPS series. No switching time, but there's a price. They
suck power in standby. I recently measured an APC1400RH, which burned
about 40 watts (70VA) doing nothing. At $0.15/kw-hr, that's about
$50/year in electricity.

But it would tend to concern me if I was making use of their
service and they were making use of wireless.

Chuckle. Many years ago, I tried to setup a 900MHz wireless link (all
that was available at the time) across the freeway between a hospital
and the medical office buildings. The hospital was "concerned" that I
might be "irradiating" the patients and killed the plan. Years later,
2.4GHz wireless is all over the hospital, plus a cell site on the
roof, but no wireless link across the freeway. The big antennas I
proposed must be more dangerous than small antennas.

Most of the wireless is the medical offices is used for updating
patient records in real time and thus eliminate medical transcription.
In the hospital, it's also used for telemetry and monitoring.

A TV station can't afford to go cheap on the transmitter
or master control, and in most cases the studio equipment.

I've never worked for a TV station, but I have worked for AM and FM
stations. Let me assure you that cutting corners on the transmitter
and studio equipment is very common. I've seen more money spent on
furniture than on equipment. Perhaps there are stations that value
their transmitters, but after 3 college and 3 broadcast stations, I
haven't seen any.

But they can
go cheap on many other things that would be just a short term inconvenience
if they fail (a new operation can't do that with remote cameras).

The current philosophy is that two pieces of junk, one acting as a
backup for the other, is better and cheaper than one allegedly
"reliable" device. I have some rather "interesting" photos of some of
transmitters and sites.

| As I said, I don't think
| you've ever estimated the cost of downtime or failure for a business.

Yes I have. But not in a medical setting.

I'll take your word for it. After paying for my learning curve, I
soon discovered that few IT people have even a clue what downtime
would cost a company or even how long it would take to recover from a
crash.

Speaking of medical settings, it sounds like you are working pretty in
depth in that field, not just the wireless/networking setting. If that
does include their computers, I sure hope you are taking appropriate
consideration for verifiably wiping out the contents of all computer
storage devices leaving such offices because of replacements or being
upgraded. If a hard drive is replaced because it's too small, do you
wipe off its content and check that it is, or irreversibly destroy it?

We smash the drives with a large hammer. However, I do break the
rules on upgrades and use a "disk nuker" problem to wipe the drive. No
sense in ruining a perfectly good drive. Keeping track of the drives
is a major problem but is being handled.

Time's up.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Do you own a Mac Pro?
    ... how much memory do you have? ... external drives. ... believe that is the only way of lowering the cost of a brand new Mac ... Actually when I was originally lusting after a Mac Pro, ...
    (comp.sys.mac.system)
  • Re: Gamespot GOTY
    ... |> drives right now cost more than the entire Eee unit. ... |> competitors to the Eee have likewise opted to drop the drive portion, ... Do a quick search on wiki for "low cost notebooks" or "one laptop for every ... child" and you'll find the competition in this price bracket. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg)
  • Re: New PC (maybe OT)
    ... someone to call on (possibly at cost) to fix it if it goes wrong or to ... that reduced power consumption as long as performance isn't too ... but will probably pay for itself over the lifetime ... Hard drives are subject to fads. ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: HP and calculator design
    ... Well I think that a calculator from HP should be built in such a way that to ... flash drives larger yet cheaper & more reliable than old spindle drives) ... Controlling cost is important, yet not a catch-all excuse for lax design. ...
    (comp.sys.hp48)
  • Re: What are 2 antennas being used for?
    ... Return rate is a killer only because it trashes brand ... cost of returns, even if scrapped, is very high, typically measured as ... consumer magazines, ... Just ask Joe Sixpack which reviews he's read on his wireless ...
    (alt.internet.wireless)