Patrick, I hope you understand something... I have no animosity towards anyone... But I really do want to light a fire under people. Too many companies (even me at times) gets too stuck "in the box" and we forget to look beyond.
>From our past conversations, you should realize what a large step it is for me to say I strongly consider your VL product under the Comnet program. But you have to understand that to do so has certain operational downsides for me as well. I'm not a mathmatician, but the way I see it, if my network backbone is 99% reliable, and my cpe is 99% reliable, I'm only 98% reliable. I have found that physical site issues have had far more to do with downtime and difficult installs, and customer issues, than the network at all. Generally, the network hums along wtihout intervention or attention. Customers do not. They forget passwords, they unplug stuff, they install home routers and put them on the same channel I'm on, they DO THESE THINGS. My issues have, in my unscientific estimation been: 1. Customer self-inflicted - perhaps about 20% of all things 2. Errors on my part (yeah, misconfiguring a router or other such bonehead goofs) - 15% 3. Downtime due to hardware failures: 10% - this includes power supplies, UPS, burned out batteries, etc sudden radio or networking equipment death that's really unexplained. 4. Physical failure of customer end equipment: 10%. Lightning and power issues. 5. acts of Nature: 5%. The rest is just... "stuff happens". breaker burns out and takes a circuit offline and I have no power to a remote site. Bugs got into a pc case and somehow or other managed to short out the ram. Power supply burned out or otherwise just croaked. ( 3 times in months ) Wire near the storage batteries somehow got exposed to acid and just parted at a random moment. Some uknown person fired up an extremely strong signal and took down the 5 ghz backhauls, and each time I moved to clear air, so did he. Then, the interference stopped mysteriously a couple months ago. My competitor and I have been unable to locate this interference, we communicated considerably on the topic, decided it seemed deliberate, but we never found the source. BTW, it took down his Trango stuff. Competitor pulled the CPE apart and managed to mangle putting it back together, taking the customer offline. So... If you have suggestions on how to cut down on the "stuff happens", that would do the most. Certainly, improved attention my part would elimenate 2, and some of 3 and possibly 4, I take my gambles, it's worked out. But if you're going to say that dramatically increased CPE quality or lifespan would transform my network's reliability... It won't. Improve? Of course. But no real big issue at the moment. yeah, I want better QOS for VOIP applications... but will my customers pay $15 more a month so I can buy them a router and higher end stuff? Probably not. So where do you thread the needle? If you had all the neato RF goodies and enhancements to the MAC, but also included routing and dynamic routing and DHCP and NAT and so on... Man, that would be one heck of a hard thing to resist. There would be no compromise other than dollars, and it's far eaiser, in my book, to compromise a small amount of dollars than it is certain fundamental network characteristics. Heck, at the lowest price you quote, there's no dollar issue to me, just a large hurdle for those smaller POP's (ap cost and some issues revolving around power consumption - my God, havn't you guys learned how to use lower power consumption stuff yet???? ). Heck, Trango and Motorola haven't even been considered, due to mostly the same thing. Someone asked me what I wanted that nearly 3 years ago when I was getting ready to put my first stuff up and I made a list. Someone filled the stuff on that list before you did. Now down the road with experience under my belt the only thing I really wish for that I don't have is better QOS capability for voip and a little better price. Would it really kill Alvarion to stop reinventing the wheel and base something on mass production in the outside world and apply thier skills to a full blown SOLUTION for residential use? Of course not. Are they even considering something with the capabilities of a WAR board cpe? I have my doubts. Are they stuck in the box? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ neofast.net - fast internet for North East Oregon and South East Washington email me at mark at neofast dot net 541-969-8200 Direct commercial inquiries to purchasing at neofast dot net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Leary" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 11:59 PM Subject: RE: [WISPA] Well, it was time to stir the pot for the new year... > Well that was worth staying up to read! Man, thanks Matt. > > ...and Mark, you might be surprised that I am harder and more pushy on > our PMs about features WISPs like you want than I ever am here on WISPs > that do things your way. Pressure achieves the best result when applied > to both sides. > > Patrick > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Matt Larsen - Lists > Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 11:02 PM > To: WISPA General List > Subject: Re: [WISPA] Well, it was time to stir the pot for the new > year... > -- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
