List mod,
Would it be out of line for me to invite the main man from this company
over to the list. I'm very interested in the service, but I can never
seem to come up with the "right" questions to ask...
I'd like to see the great minds on the list quiz him down to see if the
service is the real deal.
Brian
Mark Nash - Lists wrote:
The paid services look pretty good. I'm checking them out now. I've
looked at other 3rd party tech support companies but they all seem to
have to adapt to WISP support. This is a WISP that knows WISP needs.
When I talked with the guy he had most of the right answers to my
questions.
They will send you 2 servers to put at your main POP. The two servers
load share and fail over. The servers are in-line on your network but
parallel to each other at your POP. Your customer traffic goes
through them...they each split up the load of CPEs they manage and if
one goes down the other takes on all traffic from all CPEs.
The servers do bandwidth management (I think it's limited now in that
it cannot do traffic-type-shaping...just mainly up/down speeds on
different CPE service type profiles). They do DHCP, NMS, alerting, etc.
Their level 1 tech support:
- will take phone calls from your customers (currently they have a
12-hour shift but he said they were expanding their level 1 support
hours).
- will help your customers with their routers, their firewall
software, their e-mail program, their e-mail password
- will provision a radio on your system and set up a customer record
- will help you over the phone to allow you to have one guy out there
aiming an antenna at the AP getting feedback on bidirectional SNR,
packet loss/retransmission, etc
- will help you over the phone if you're on top of a tower putting on
a connector and asking "How's that working now?"
Their NOC support:
- responds to alarms and checks a protocol to see if you want to be
woken up at 2 in the morning for such an alarm (7/24)
- watches performance of backhauls
Their billing system is free for you to use and integrates with the
customer service side of the database. If you have your own merchant
account for billing via credit card, it will do that free of charge.
If you want to use their merchant account, there are fees. You can
even set it up so that your customers can pay by check but you never
have to handle the checks (with fees, of course, as this will take
labor).
I'm on the upper end of their 250-CPE mark and will pay $250 per month
with (most likely) no $$$ up front. Then I will pay $500 per month
for the 251st-500th CPEs. I am going to try this out on a 1-year
contract. It's worth that much to me just to see if it will work out
for my situation.
I think that if it is a good service, then it will be a good option
for some small WISPs. It is clear to me that if my business will keep
growing, it will grow out of a service like this. This may buy me
some time and get me over that hump, though.
p.s. I haven't talked with them about their CPE lease option but I
plan to. I'm also talking to other leasing companies about leasing
CPE. Anyone out there have opinions on leasing companies? (I chose
my words carefully there about not starting a debate on whether or not
to lease CPE.)
Mark Nash
Network Engineer
UnwiredOnline.Net
350 Holly Street
Junction City, OR 97448
http://www.uwol.net
541-998-5555
541-998-5599 fax
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