Now that sounds like a decent plan. Let
some other poor shmuck take all the SAT risk. ADT is a US wide
security company. They have set up a lot of resellers, made them buy the
equipment they install, then pay them for the account. The catch is that if the
account misses a single payment in the first two years they charge back the already
puny commission to the installing company. The only way to make money in the
residential alarm business is off of residual income from the account, but
simce you sell that account to ADT (required) you only make a few buck at the
end of three years. To make things worse, they can sell direct in any area and
cut the throats of the resellers. Which they also do on a regular basis. You
may have heard of their free to $99 alarm system. They then charge almost $50
for setup and $45 per month for monitoring. The equipment that is installed
costs $75, setup takes 5 minutes from a remote computer over the phone lines.
Install takes about 2 hours. Monitoring costs about $3 per month. So who is loosing
out on this deal? The customer AND the dealer. ADT just keeps getting richer. They
have removed almost all risk for themselves and take most of the money. If you
canât tell, I do not like ADT. ADT and DishNetwork are the main reasons that I
charge full install costs to the customer and a sane monthly fee instead of
tricking them to sign up and then raping them on monthly fees. I still get new
customers on a regular basis. I have never had a customer fail to pay monthly
fees. I donât ever loose money, and my overhead stays lower than my home
electric bill. Donât get sucked in to the big boyâs game of free equipment and
high monthly costs. They know how to play it too well. All most of us have to
do is to convince people to hate us less than any other competing company.
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sevak Avakians
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003
8:42 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Hi Tom,
I meant that he should team up with someone else doing sat sales and package
his service with theirs.
What's ADT??
On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 14:37, Tom Haynes wrote:
ï
Donât get in to sat tv installs. There is a little money in
it IF (That is a very big if) you never lose a customer in the first few years
depending on the contract. Most of your Sat income will pay your installers.
The more money you try to save the more money you will lose. If your only plan
is to keep your installers paid and attract customers to your WISP then you
might find it usefull. I would place Sat sales somewhere between ADT and
Amway.
From:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rick Kosick
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003
2:21 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Good idea. I only service business customers but I do like
the concept.
What I have found is that people prefer Comcast over
anything else. They have it at home, they want it at work. Simple as that.
If you recall... at one time AOL was synonomous with
the word "Internet". Every TV commercial used to say "visit us
on the web at www.whatever.com
or AOL KEYWORK: whatever"
People didn't know the difference. AOL was, for the most
part, "the Internet".
Comcast is now taking that seat. Everything is compared (in
my area) to Comcast and even when the pricing is close, they go Comcast.
They are geniouses for getting themseleves into this
position (and the FCC's pocket)
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
----- Original Message -----
From: Sevak Avakians
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why not to use smartBridge...
Maybe you should change your ads to show the savings they can get instead of
putting down the price?
BTW, try to get in with the local DirectTV guys in your area and bundle
packages with them. Many people are unwilling to convert to another ISP
because they've got cable TV service. But DirectTV has better deals and
I'm sure you can find a bunch of customers willing to take your service with
DirectTV or other satellite TV service. It's a win-win-win for you, the
satellite service you team up with, and your customers.
Sevak
On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 12:53, John Banes wrote:
ï
In our area they are advertising $19.99 a month for the first 3 months. The
people don't look at the price after that to find that it goes up to $45. And
that's for 1.5 megs download speed.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: Colin Watson
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
How badly are u suffering? Why can't you compete?
----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Kosick
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Nope, wasn't me who called. I started out with Breezecom
about 3 years ago and remained pretty small. I'm taking it in the backside now
with Comcast here giving it all away for free. Scumbags.
Wouldn't it be so nice to have that monopoly? Run wires to
every home and then call it a private network so nobody else has access to the
wire. Funny, 230' of their cable runs across my lawn and I don't see any rent
money for that "private network". What a waste the FCC is.
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
----- Original Message -----
From: Sevak Avakians
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Hi Rick,
I'm in NYC. Yeah, both our areas (NY & PA) were hit bad yesterday!
PA? There was a guy in PA that wanted to setup a WISP and had called me
for tips awhile back...that wasn't you, right? If I remember correctly,
his name was also Rick.
Sevak
On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 11:02, Rick Kosick wrote:
ï
No luck. I downgraded to lower firmware and nothing.
I am going to try and reset it by using the button on PowerShot and trying from
scratch. Otherwise, I have to dump the equipment and move to something else.
Way too much time spent on this what-should-be-simple setup. It did work for
about 5 mins until I tried enabling WEP. Ever since though, nothing.
Where are you located that you have 55MPH wind? I'm in PA
and have the same problem. Trees down everywhere :-(
Where can I get 1.4j.9? Maybe that will do it?
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
----- Original Message -----
From: Sevak Avakians
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Hi Rick,
Turns out that I'm also having problems getting 2 aPPOT units to bridge.
At first, I was having trouble with one of the appot to broadcast it's
ssid. The other appot did not take up the ssid changes I made to
it. Whenever sniffing wirelessly, its ssid appeared as
airPointProOutdoorTOTAL. After re-flashing the rom, rebooting, and
switching from wireless bridge mode to client bridge mode then back to wireless
bridge mode, the ssid appears properly on the second unit. (Note, that
the ssid as seen from the monitor program would always appear as the correct
one. It was only from looking at the wireless broadcast that I could see
that the ssid was incorrect.)
Well, anyway it is way too windy here today for me to continue (55 mph winds!),
so I'll take another look at it tomorrow.
Any luck with your setup???
Sevak
On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 09:19, Rick Kosick wrote:
ï
Software: 1.6
Firmware: 1.4j.8
Both sides.
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
----- Original Message -----
From: Sevak Avakians
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 9:11
AM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Rick, if you got the firmware off the website, it may not be the latest.
Usually sb has a beta version that they post on this list and most of us use
before it is posted to the website.
Check the version number using simpleNMS or the firmware upgrade utility.
Sevak
On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 09:05, Rick Kosick wrote:
ï
I don't know the actual version number but I just downloaded
it off the website in the past few days and it is the very latest on both
sides.
This part about it bringing the switch to its knees is VERY
disturbing because a switch, by its design, should not allow that to happen
normally. I can see it happening to a hub.
I was working on this remotely (from home) at late hours
both times and had to drive to the NOC to remedy it because I couldn't access
any machines via PC Anywhere. The whole network crashed basically.
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
----- Original Message -----
From: Blazen Wireless
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 8:59
AM
Subject: Re: [smartBridges] Why
not to use smartBridge...
Interesting what firmware were you using which should not
affect your switch like that just curious to know..
----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Kosick
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 5:39
AM
Subject: [smartBridges] Why not to
use smartBridge...
So far I've come up with three good reasons to not continue
to use smartBridges but I'm open to suggestions for fixing these problem.
Pardon my frustration but I have 3 years of wireless experience and its taking me
more than 10 hours of fiddling to get a simple Wireless Bridge to Wireless
Bridge up and running and I am sitting here with more problems than solutions
right now.
1) Last week I plugged the ethernet side of an APPO into an
APCC PNET4 ethernet surge supressor where there where three other devices
plugged in. This caused severe packet loss on the other devices. Pinging the
other devices between each other would result in 4 out of 10 pings timeing out.
SOLUTION: Bypass the ethernet surge
supressor.
2) Right now I have two APPO's configured in Wireless Bridge mode (which won't work, see #3).
At my NOC side its plugged into a D-Link DES3226 Managed Switch. If I put the
APPO into Access Point mode, it KILLS the traffic on my switch entirely to
the point where workstations and servers can barely reach each other. As soon
as I unplug the APPO's ethernet connection from the switch, immediately
everything goes back to normal. This has happened twice now in my quest to get
my wireless link working.
SOLUTION: No idea. Maybe avoid Access
Point mode?
3) I have to admit I did enjoy 3 minutes of Wireless Bridge mode where everything worked as
it was expected, but I got adventerous and enabled WEP. This did not work out
for some reason and now, after disabling WEP... I cannot get the Wireless Bridge mode to work again. I've reset to
Defaults and started over, still nothing. I simply cannot get Wirless Bridge
to Wireless Bridge mode to work at this point. I've
been through the "recycling both sides", "double checking
MAC#'s", etc. You'd think that if this was going to work at all, I would
have accidentally made it work by now.
SOLUTION: None as of yet.
Clearly, when considering points #1 and #2 above, there is
more happening on the ethernet side of the link than just ethernet. Something
is different than a standard ethernet connection because this radio
clearly caused major packet loss between the other devices plugged into am
ethernet surge supressor. Maybe power is leaking through from the PowerShot
device? And, its ability to completely bring a managed switch to its knees just
reassures this..
===
Rick Kosick
StarLinX Internet Service
