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....
