I am seeking a $100 turnkey micro hardware appliance to plug into a LAN hub
(behind a consumer-level cable modem) whose only purpose in life is to send
heartbeat (and simple quality of service metrics) to a pre-configured central
aggregation service on the WAN.
Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by
non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must be pre-configured and literally
plug and play without need for the person installing the appliance to open a
web browser to configure. And it must be a secure, good-reputation stand-alone
hardware appliance ... because the heartbeat cannot / must not be a service
installed on the end-user's computer where it becomes a support burden (e.g.,
did the end-user turn off their computer? Is their antivirus software blocking
the outgoing heartbeat? That the end-user needs to enter a
username/password/destination to enable the heartbeat, etc)
There is a commercial turnkey solution that meets all the requirements except
one -- that the solution cannot exceed $100 per remote appliance :
http://www.myconnectionserver.com/learnmore/quality.html
Question to the list: do you know of an alternative hardware solution under
$100 that would suffice -- and be of such quality that an incumbent internet
service provider will not thumb their nose at me when I call in to report
remote users are down based upon the loss of heartbeats from the remote users?
MOTIVATION FOR THE ABOVE
Ten elderly neighbors to my mother in a rural area suffer frequent internet
outages from their one (and only) incumbent cable internet service provider.
All of them have learned they will encounter one of the following responses :
"You are the only one reporting a problem"
OR
"We need three reports before we take action"
OR
"We fixed it. You need to re-boot your modem. (moments later after rebooting
cable modem). It must be your computer that is the problem."
OR
"We know there is a problem. We'll send a crew out to repair the issue next
week"
These 10 elderly neighbors are fuming ... and they recently formed a call tree
-- so that when one person suffers an internet outage, they call other
neighbors in the call tree to see if they too have an outage ... and if so,
each calls in an outage report (often 20 minutes of being placed on hold)
The call tree is working (somewhat) to improve accountability and response by
the cable service provider ... but it is a waste of their time as there is no
formal "record" of outage events to spur the provider to provide refunds for
unscheduled service outages. Thus, I am seeking a turnkey quality of service
micro appliance that automates (and documents) service outage notifications ..
so as to allow me (living in a city and my being on a different internet
service provider) to take on the role of calling the rural cable service
provider and claim (with authority) that I know that 10 individuals systems
(who have the heartbeat appliance installed) are down and that the cable
service provider needs to fix the issue...
