How About 100% Uptime for Us Regular Idiots?

I reviewed these two news items today, which have a common theme:

Global Crossing's Unparalleled IP Network Performance Enables New Guarantees on Converged IP Services

Excerpt: Global Crossing's upgraded SLAs offer customers industry-leading guarantees for its converged IP services provisioned over the premium Class of Service (CoS), including: End-to-end availability of 99.999 percent, compared to the previous guarantee 99.9 percent.

Japan's NTT Communications Selects Micromuse's Netcool Solutions for Business Service Management Backbone

Excerpt: Netcool Solutions Help Support Global Carrier's Guarantee of 100% Uptime of New Hosting Services

I've often thought that there must be a huge market in the small business and consumer markets for computing systems and connectivity that actually work. I would be willing to pay good money if someone could sell me 100% reliability for my home office network and computers. Heck, I'd even settle for 99.999%!

AB -- 11/29/04