[acomjean]

I worked at a company that made electricity usage monitors. The little boxes would send data to us with energy usage every minute.

We could see how often internet went down, based on how many times the boxes sent us "stored" data.

We didn't do any analysis on the data, but we did note that the residential internet while good isn't as always on as you think it should be. We were wondering how much of a problem this was going to be for home automation. (It would be frustrating not to be able to connect)

Also of note in the three years I was there before I left, its seemed to be getting better. It might be that the business switched more to corporate customers and there internet was better. We ended up doing some thermostat control and it worked for the most part (Most wifi thermostats are kinda crappy, thus the rise of the nest)

[defineclean]

The question is, is it that corporate internet is that much better, or that they're just more diligent about making sure that their internet never goes down?

In other words: a residential customer is more likely to accidentally unplug their modem, or maybe flip a lightswitch that controls an outlet that the modem is plugged into, or accidentally flip the switch on their surge protector, or turn their modems off at night to save electricity, or to have old/bad cabling running from the telephone poles that need replacing.

[acomjean]

>or that they're just more diligent about making sure that their internet never goes down?

I think that has something to do with it. Business too have blocks of time (nights) when the internet can go down and nobody is going to call for service. I wasn't involved with the network provisioning but often we were put on the same network as the "guest wifi" as opposed to the business network or the network with the cash registers (for security reasons)