Brian,
How is billing done when most high ARPU business's demand paper billing?
This is something I don't get. What is the difference between me
generating the bill, emailing it out, and them printing
it.....vs........me generating the bill.......me printing it
out........letting snail mail pick it up.
It's the same. Both times it is generated, printed, and mailed. I don't
paper bill. I just tell them to push print.
Thats the difference between a full service company and a commodity service
provider, the full service provider understands why the customer should not
have to "click print."
There is more to it though. Large business accounting practices is for all
Snail mail to be sent to the accounting department for processing. The
common bin that all accounting personel look to to enter new bills into
their accounting system for net terms payment. Email accounts generally
tend to be individual specific apposed to group specific. They are trained
to open envelopes, because 99% of their bills come that way. Its about
proceedure. People forget about things that go against proceedure. OFten
Email invoices nevewr get to the authoritary person, never get entered, and
then never get paid. Business do not want special circumstnace proceedures
that have to be remembered. Businesses don;t want providers that take money
out of their accounts without guaranteed paper trails, or without guarantee
or confirmation that services were first provided. They don;t want to be
responsible for billing errors automatically withdrawn, they want to
maintain control. What do you do when cash flow does not allow payment? Are
you going to disconnect a high ARPU business? Do you want to get the
excuses, "I didn't get the bill so it didn't get entered for payment"? Its
our responsibility to get it to them. Email addresses change, street
addresses rarely do. Leigitimate Email often gets blocked as spam, snail
mail always goes through.
How is bandwdith management done when just limiting a single backhaul
connection is no longer the requirement, and smarter things are needed
like roaming policies, QOS, Labeling, Latency guarantees, nested/layered
cell sites, MPLS type stuff, tracking dissimilar network equipmentthat
gets deployed differently, etc..
I think this system will do exactly what it represents, help a WISP get
started, so they can concentrate on selling, operate more efficiently,
and track their progress for better obtaining funding, during the early
years. But as soon as someone starts to scale,
If a WISP were mostly residential, what is a guesstimate of the number of
subs one would have at the "starts to scale" time?
Hard to say. But with residential, its more important to have efficient
system for managing the customers, to make low revenue business feasible,
and its less important to have all the extra fancy custom QOS and tracking
features.
Partnership tracking, revenue share tracking, QOS, Latency guarantees, etc,
are all Business High ARPU needs.
The flip side is that for residential, not having the systems may prevent
being able to scale. Its the high ARPU business models that cost justify
self made custom applications, apposed to using whats available.
they are going to realize how they need to make their own custom solution
because whats available isn't going to cut it, and its going to be cost
jsutified to put complete solutions in place. I guess my point is, even
the best solutions are not good enough.
It is hard to believe we are all so different in our operations. Is there
not something available somewhere out there that would work for most? How
can we get anything done as an industry in we all have to invent our own
wheel from scratch.
Well, I hope it is obvious that I need a "WISP services" service, because
I do.
I agree. Its not our businesses that are so different. But unfortunately the
software developers haven't quite gotten it yet. (our business) They come
close, but close is not good enough. Everyone wants to leverage what they
already have an adapt it. BUt that doesn't work, the application needs to be
done from the ground up, as the WISP business is much different than other
tech businesses, and other wired ISP businesses. The flow of a WISP's
opperations are completely different. I'm building my own app only because
I waiting 5 years for someone else to do it and it never came.
Sure there are things like OptiGold, Logisense, and Platipus that came
close. But that only gets you half way there.
Sure WISPs no what they need, but they tend to do hte absolute minimum
needed for their need, as they are in the WISP business not the applications
sales business. It also becomes a conflic of interest for them to sell their
solutions that give them thier competitive advantage.
The things that scares me about dboss services is it's not mine. It'd be
nice to be able to have some program that does all the "WISP services" but
is installed on my server in my data center and only I have access. That
way no one can mess it up for me and no one can keep me out.
Those are the reasons I'd never use it. Locking me out of my own customers
list would kill me. Integration to my own systems would also be harder. It
gives them the leverage to expand into your market and steal your cusomers,
if they had a business case to do so. Everyone wants to guarantee that they
get paid. But sometimes everyone can't, and the WISP needs to be able to
make that decission of who. Lose control of billing, and you lose control of
client.
My bigger concern with the app was that its an upsell for other things. What
if they other things don;t evolve to be state of the art? You've got an app
that can't adapt to the better box you make your self. The question is how
sophisticated does a WISP plan to be, and will they have a better router
solution themselves, needing integration? Maybe maybe not.
But the flip side is a program like that can save a smaller WISP. My thought
is the application forces a WISP to mold to good cash flow model, and I'd
guess the leasing opportunity is real, as the application guarantees when it
is safe to grant the lease or not. Finance may be a bigger problem for a
small WISP than needing to keep inhouse control of their accounting
application.
I wish I would have had an application like that 5 years ago. I can count
the hours it would have saved, and the structure it would have helped mold.
Tom DeReggi
Brian
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message ----- From: "Butch Evans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:14 AM
Subject: RE: [WISPA] FREE OSS and Billing Software for WiSPS
On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, Charles Wu wrote:
We failed miserably as a WISP, but now we'll apply our "know-how" and
help you "succeed"
??? Where did you get this impression?
P.S. Looking at their web site, they look like a Tranzeo reseller
Ahhh...I see why you said that...
--
Butch Evans
Network Engineering and Security Consulting
573-276-2879
http://www.butchevans.com/
Mikrotik Certified Consultant
(http://www.mikrotik.com/consultants.html)
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