Calix historically sold to ILECs via dedicated regional sales reps. You had personalized service. They didn’t have a product with universal appeal until they did the 844.
I will volunteer to stock and sell their products via my ecommerce site if they will give me enough margin to make it worth it. From: Ken Hohhof Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 11:03 AM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi Agreed, but that’s their business model. I think similar to the companies that OEM “gateways” to the likes of AT&T and Comcast. These are not supposed to find their way onto Amazon and Walmart online stores for end users to buy themselves and then try to figure out how to link them into their service provider’s operations systems. I guess our customers could make the same complaint about us. Maybe a few WISPs have online ordering portals, but I’m guessing very few. Not talking about put your location in here and a salesperson will call you, but actually sign up and schedule installation, similar to what we used to do with dialup service (where we just needed to assign a username and password, and publish a list of local access numbers). From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jon Langeler Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 11:37 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi I think it’s a turn off when they don’t have an online store somewhere to simply order a 10 or 100 pack, or anything. But I got that vibe from them as well. Jon Langeler Michwave Technologies, Inc. On Dec 23, 2018, at 1:14 AM, Jason Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: How does one get Calix to talk to you? They seemed less than interested to talk at WISPAPalooza and no call from the lead generated at he show. Jason Wilson Remotely Located Providing High Speed Internet to out of the way places 530-651-1736 Office 530-748-9608 Cell www.remotelylocated.com On Dec 22, 2018, at 7:35 PM, Darin Steffl <[email protected]> wrote: You have to buy direct from Calix. We upped our plan prices $10 per month for new subs and now give the router "free". We're slowly migrating existing customers to these new plans and putting the Calix in their home. We're about 60% complete with the process. It dramatically reduces the number of tech support calls related to wifi issues. Huge time saver, money maker, and keeping customers happy and churn low. On Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 8:56 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected] wrote: The other piece of information that wasn’t apparent to me on casual inspection is there’s a minimum sub count if you want to use their Cloud features. My take is you need to come at it from the perspective that all your subs are going to get the Calix router, rather than viewing it as an optional upsell. At least if your WISP is relatively small. If you have 5000+ subs, that would be different. You could go through a transition with existing customers, but eventually it would be like a cable modem, everyone gets one. Either you throw it in for free, or charge a non optional modem rental fee. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Chuck McCown Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2018 7:23 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi I buy direct. I think that is how they do it with everyone. Sent from my iPhone On Dec 22, 2018, at 6:20 PM, David Coudron <[email protected]> wrote: Where do you purchase the Calix equipment from? Our typical sources don’t seem to carry them (Streakwave, Winncom, ISPSupplies, Linktechs, etc. Are you purchasing direct from Calix? Regards, David Coudron From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Darin Steffl Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 5:34 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi Calix is the only good method today for routers and a mesh solution that can be managed by the ISP. Powerline adapters suck and we don't use them anymore. WiFi extenders are just as bad and we tell customers to throw them in the garbage. They cause more issues than they fix. We have 850+ Calix GigaCenters in the field and are deploying more of the Mesh units. Everything is very easy to provision and we have full visibility into the home network. Pricing is pretty good and we get to make money on it instead of the customer just spending money on their own solution. Sell it to the customer that we will warranty for the life of their service with us. On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 5:31 PM Jason McKemie <[email protected]> wrote: The GigaSpire Max & Blast look intriguing. Not sure on pricing as of yet though. On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 5:06 PM <[email protected]> wrote: Calix 844 has a mesh extender that supposedly has touchless provisioning. I have a mesh box at home to play with but still have not taken it out of the box. From: David Coudron Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 4:01 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Subject: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi We have been running into more and more situations where customers either have homes that are too large to effectively cover with a good router, or have so many devices at the far end of the house from where their router has to be positioned that we are looking for good options to provide better whole house coverage. We have worked with Powerline extenders, but consider them to be too inconsistent for wide spread use, and have worked with some wireless extenders. The wireless extenders have a pretty big impact on wireless speed that we aren’t excited about them as a go forward solution. We also can’t log into the powerline or wireless extenders without some port forwarding work in their main router. We have played around with some mesh options, particularly the Ubiquiti Amplifi product, which we really like, but feel like it is not an option since we cannot manage it remotely. Netgear Orbi certainly seems like a viable option, but kind of spendy if you need 3 nodes. Cost isn’t necessarily an issue since customers will buy this equipment rather than us fund it, but we don’t want the solution to be so expensive no one opts for it. I know there has been a few threads on managed routers, but this seems like a little bit different take since we are going to have customers buy the equipment, but would like to be able to manage remotely. I suppose one option would be to still provide an inexpensive managed router as we currently do and have them manage the mesh system on their own. Any thoughts on what has worked well for whole house mesh systems, especially in a remote management situation? Regards, David Coudron -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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