NZ - the worlds fastest most disconnected intranet?

Last week I was working from home for a day and cursed like mad when I could not do three simple things accessing international cloud: booking exams for staff, taking a screen shot of a Customer Portal and provisioning a new CRM cloud for a customer.

After must frustration and opening an closing of the browser and patiently waiting for things to happen, my cat then decided to walk across the keyboard and swipe itself across my touch-screen(oh the joys of working from home).  Now I have ultra magnified, slow browsers on my screen with no menu bars.  The odd thing is when I want to find those short-cuts myself, I can never find them.....!

I had to find away to vent my frustration, so I simply emailed Wayne about the fact our home Internet is just too slow and unreliable to use anymore....and of course its his fault, not mine!

So after a frustrating afternoon trying to get things sorted, I find out a few days later that there was an outage on some cloud services...including the ones I happened to be accessing.  How frustrating.  Would have been nice to see some sort of page "due to some odd weather conditions in Albania were are experiencing temporary intermittent problems with our clouds currently, we expect the outage to be...oh, 8 hours or so".  At least then I would not have sent the harsh email to my husband asking for an instant Internet upgrade to happen yesterday to our home Internet connection. ....and the cat wouldn't have been told off for trying to help...!

I even had it a few nights later on on-line banking when I went to pay for the awesome Trade-me purchase I convinced myself I had scored.  I really was convinced that using a pillow case to line the inside of an old draw would be enough to trick the cat into thinking it was her new cat bed - it was a cunning plan that failed terribly. 

Wayne thought it was hilarious when she simply curled up on the floor NEXT to the draw and went to sleep.  Yet another Trade-me purchase gone wrong.  Wayne thinks it's funny as I have no time to shop during the day so I shop online, but 50% of what I buy is either the wrong colour, size, breaks or simply never works from the start.  We now have a pile of these failed Trade-me purchases in our office....waiting to be re-listed in the on-going Trade-me life-cycle.  It's just annoying that when Wayne uses Trade-me, it's for selling things.  The last thing he sold was Rugby Tickets and he made $350 dollars on them......but I had the last laugh as the Men-in Tutus ballet we went to instead of the rugby cost about that amount.  Thanks to his iPhone and the guy in the row behind us constantly asking for the score, meant he didn't miss much anyway!  Needless to say, he was not very impressed to see guys with make-up in Tutus prancing around on the stage...especially when he got the best tickets and they were front row seats!  Every little detail could be seen, perhaps not such a great thing for him with guys in pink Lycra and tights...he'll get over it, one day!

So don't get me wrong, I love the cloud, in fact I have been moving more and more things to it- I love its mobility, the applications that run in it like CRM that make it so seamless to access via multiple devices in multiple locations.......so why is it that when there are cloud issues, its like "did you see that"  or  "...are you having problems"?  You get nothing back or 'its all good on our end'.  I think providers need to man-up.  Put outage notices up when there are problems so innocent people can get on with other work.  Isn't this how it worked in the olden days?  I know one of the teams I used to run used to have migration evenings- every Wednesday night between 6-10pm.  We had a special page we would put up to let people know what was happening and when things would be back.  Food for thought?

So back to my Internet issues and frustrations.  Why is it that nothing is ever fast enough or well enough connected for me?  In my last post, I discussed the fact our work cars just instantly connect our phones simultaneously to bluetooth- both driver and passenger, yet just a plain old browser over an even plainer Internet connection, connecting to a few plain old clouds still does not seem to work.

So to today, it's odd where twice in one day you hear about major broadband and fibre issues....or is it?

Today, one of the fibre providers were out in south Auckland doing work where we had some of our team at a client.  There was a site wide internet outage, it would have affected around 5,000 people, it lasted for hours.  Then, this afternoon I met with a CRM prospect in Albany, only to find out that they can't even get hooked into Ultra-Fast Broad-band because they are in a multi-tenanted building!

Seriously, how connected are we really?  Slow international speeds, constant outages due to fibre being laid in the ground causing hours of in-business hours down-time....and of course our clouds just disappearing for a few hours and re-appearing on the occasional whim.....

I think I expect too much, and I agree, I am highly connected.  In fact, when I was compiling this blog I actually had a minor freak out.  I am ALWAYS connected, except on a plane.  So here is how that works- Laptop at work- wireless or wired.  Windows Phone in bag- wireless and/ or 3G.  iPod Touch in Bag- Wireless- work and home.  iPod Nano- Wireless at home, iPad- Wireless and 3G.  I have my phone, iPods (x2) and iPad next to my bed in the evening.  How terrible.  I have FOUR devices that are always connected, right next to me at all times.  At work I have THREE.  This is a sad but true fact, I need to be connected, always and I expect it.

So is it really that bad having NZ as the worlds fastest Intranet?  I just want to be connected and getting NZ sorted goes a long way to getting us prepared for when that fantastic International connection arrives....one day in the distant ...or near future...who knows?