Lots of good points here. I think when I sold mine bandwidth was about 8% of my total expense. Finally the last 3 yeasts we established a regular test cycle for batteriesalong with writing the install date and last test date. Really helps with outages. I can't say how many timesan outage occurred and when I would dig deeper the answer was "you were putting so much pressure on us to deploy i didn't document or write up the monitoring." I had to start inspecting and testing the sites myself,which is really what I should have been doing all along.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 10:09 AM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: > Or lacks economies of scale. > > I was reading about Oracle buying NetSuite, and it mentioned that after > Oracle bought PeopleSoft, they fired 5000 employees. > > Profits = revenues – expenses > > We tend to assume that if we take care of the top line, the bottom line > will take care of itself. I’m not arguing against that, just saying some > of the big guys seem to find it easier to cut expenses. > > It doesn’t help that whenever someone “explains” the ISP business model, > they simplify it to bandwidth costs a penny a gigabit, and everything else > is profit. So people don’t think about things like batteries at tower > sites. And it certainly is easier for big wired ISPs who can cherry pick > their territories so they don’t have remote sites feeding 20 subscribers. > It makes GPON sound attractive, put all the electronics in a nice building > in town, and run passive fiber to the customers. > > In fairness, mobile carriers have remote cellsites which pretty much all > have generators. > > The sin I’m most guilty of is putting battery backup at a site and then > not implementing remote monitoring and alarming, so I don’t find out that I > have to take out a portable generator until the site has been running on > batteries for a day and they’ve run down. The other thing with batteries > is you’ll go 3 years without a power outage and then finally you have one > and you didn’t replace the batteries and they fail. So it’s necessary to > regularly test the batteries or else replace them on a schedule. > > > *From:* CBB - Jay Fuller <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Sunday, July 31, 2016 9:50 AM > *To:* [email protected] > *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine > > a smaller company certainly has a smaller budget.... > > > ----- Original Message ----- > *From:* Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> > *To:* [email protected] > *Sent:* Sunday, July 31, 2016 8:54 AM > *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine > > The secret is to not let it bother you, or create systems and hire people > that just ignore customer complaints. At least that’s what some big ISPs > with no competition do. (Frontier, Centurylink) I compare them to slum > landlords who buy distressed properties and don’t spend a lot of money > fixing them up or doing maintenance. If people don’t like it, evict them > and somebody else will take their place. The churn costs less than fixing > and upgrading the infrastructure, and ignoring the whining customers > doesn’t cost anything if it’s part of your plan and you don’t lose sleep > over it. If you’re really clever, you build government subsidies into your > business plan. > > It’s like if you sell your WISP to a big company, you probably imagine > they will implement all the upgrades you couldn’t afford or didn’t get > around to. Probably not. Once you stop losing sleep over customers saying > bad things about you on Facebook, you spend only enough to keep the churn > down to a tolerable percentage, the point where the cost of acquiring > replacement customers starts to exceed what it would cost to fix the > network. Even with competition, inertia is a powerful force. Some people > will whine but not leave. > > > *From:* CBB - Jay Fuller <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:19 PM > *To:* [email protected] > *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine > > > hahaha - that requires money! i have to pay for my mafia... > > > ----- Original Message ----- > *From:* Colin Stanners <[email protected]> > *To:* [email protected] > *Sent:* Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:11 PM > *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine > > > That's the fun of running an Internet provider, which a lot of people > consider an "essential utility" these days. All you can do is add > redundancy through more towers and more UPS capacity. > On Jul 30, 2016 5:30 PM, "CBB - Jay Fuller" <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> >> so i lost tower "b" yesterday during a storm. not a bad loss, actually. >> water in a cable shorted out a power supply. >> just happened to be the one backhaul link in. i got it fixed about 2 pm? >> >> this morning about 11 am another round of storms took out the main tower >> - tower "A " - power outage, i assume. haven't been down there yet. >> (ok, it's four hours later, its probably not just a power outage) >> >> now i'm getting calls from customers on "B" that they haven't had service >> in days. I guess not, if they didn't use it from 3 pm yesterday until 11 >> this morning.....uggh.... >> >> correction - i don't take calls on weekends. but they know me on >> facebook.... >> >> >> >> >
