This is where we are now..
I had to get over some Chemically induced pneumonia first before I could
get back to it again so Ive been busy doing some automation reporting.
I need to get some more of Forrests Site monitors and some AC current
transducers for watching the lighting systems on a few more of our towers.
Thank goodness for cacti for consolidating all this stuff and loganalyzer.
What I need now is to get an alarm system in my office or a big red
light that comes on when a critical alarm hits on these reports.
On 07/31/2016 10:22 AM, Lewis Bergman wrote:
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]
<mailto:[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 <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Sunday, July 31, 2016 9:50 AM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine
a smaller company certainly has a smaller budget....
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Ken Hohhof <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[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 <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:19 PM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[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 <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[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]
<mailto:[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....
