Honestly, a RB2011 fills that niche pretty well. Lock the LCD to display
only WAN bandwidth, and disable the touchscreen. Techs can log into the
RB2011 with the admin credentials and check on the wireless clients,
interface errors, run speed tests (tcp) to the headend of your network, etc.
$5/mo for router management a month is what we charge, and the people
that have the service love it.
Josh Reynolds, Chief Information Officer
SPITwSPOTS, www.spitwspots.com <http://www.spitwspots.com>
On 10/05/2014 01:18 PM, TJ Trout via Af wrote:
I would love to find a router that has poe output and all of the
diagnostic features you mentioned. It would be nice if the customer
could just look at the router to see the status of the connection up
down or otherwise.
On Oct 5, 2014 2:13 PM, "Chris Fabien via Af" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'd say you are correct. Would love to have the functionality but
even at $75 I couldn't justify the cost.
On Oct 5, 2014 5:08 PM, "Forrest Christian (List Account) via Af"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Following up on the previous email about product ideas, I have
an idea for a product which at least I think would be really
cool, but I also think would likely be a big flop, just
because of the apparent cost sensitivity of installs.
It seems to me that it would be nice to replace the power
injector at customer sites with more of an intelligent device.
One that provides functionality like traffic metering, cable
diagnostics, customer-location speed tests, and so on. The
unit would have jacks for the radio, the customer equipment,
and power. It would also have a display which shows
real-time usage data for the customer to be able to determine
for themselves what their current internet consumption is.
There are a lot of natural outgrowths from this such as
watchdog reset of the radio itself, automatic problem
notification to the WISP, etc. My goal would be to
instrument this as much as possible.
If you think of this as a 'smart power meter' for internet,
with diagnostic tools built in, then you've got the basic
idea. This is not intended to replace the customer router/nat
device, and will only be a Layer 2 device as far as traffic
goes. There will likely be some limited traffic shaping
possible based on the underlying ethernet swtich chipset.
Unfortunately, these can't be a $20 device. $75 might be
doable for higher volumes, but $100 is more in the comfort
zone for the volumes I typically move. Of course, this is a
CPE device and I'm not even sure how many I'd sell so these
prices are guesses at best - but more likely to go down
instead of up.
Although I suspect most people would love to have one of these
at each install, I have a hard time believing that most people
would swallow adding even $75 to the cost of each install, let
alone the $100 which might be the price I'd have to hit for
lower volume. Is this a fair assumption? Would you add such
a device to each install?
