(The following is a mostly-duplicate of an email I
sent out to customers who asked to be notified of new
product announcements).
At WISPAPALOOZA next week, we’ll be showcasing
the SiteMonitor Base 3 Classic Edition.
The Base 3 is the successor of the current Base Unit
II product. It’s designed with an easy to use and
mobile-friendly web interface virtually identical to
the one in our RackInjector product. Gone are the
1’s and 0’s of the old SNMP-based web interface.
Instead, everything is easy to understand and much
more intuitive. If you’re at WISPAPALOOZA, stop by
and take a look (and tell your friends too).
In addition, the Base 3 is designed with the future
in mind. The existing Base Unit II product reached a
point where there wasn’t any room in the internal
program memory to add more functionality. In
contrast, we’ve just barely touched the surface of
what the Base 3 is capable of. We’ll be adding more
and more features as time goes on.
The Classic Edition retains the existing form factor
and maintains electrical compatibility with the
existing product line. It is designed as a drop-in
replacement for the older Base Units. At most sites,
you’ll be able to simply swap out a Base Unit II for
a Base 3 and gain all of the functionality of the
newer Base 3.
For those of you who have expansion modules (such as
SyncInjectors, PowerInjectors, additional I/O and/or
other interfaces), our intent is to support most
expansion modules that have shipped. At release,
you’ll be able to manage the Base 3 and Revision H
or later SyncInjectors and PowerInjectors. Others
will be added quickly afterward. The only possible
exception is some of the very first modules we
shipped well over 7 years ago – we’re still
assessing the earliest modules to determine what’s
needed to support them. If we can support them, we
will.
For many of the expansion modules, you’ll instantly
gain much more functionality than was possible to
accomplish with the previous Base Unit. As a
specific example, the SyncInjectors and
PowerInjectors are gaining greatly improved GPS and
1PPS status information, to help troubleshoot any
GPS receiver problems one might have. In addition,
port descriptions are now long enough to store
pretty much any information and are set on a
per-port, not per-item basis.
We’ll be taking pre-orders for the new Base 3
shortly, with units hopefully shipping around the
end of the year. Initially, pre-orders will be
limited to 2 per customer, primarily for in-network
testing. The pre-order price will be the same as the
existing Base Unit II’s at $99.95. We are still
working on setting the final price, but it will be
most likely to be somewhat higher due to increased
product costs.
Although we feel that many of our customers will
switch over to the Base 3, we also know that some
people will want to continue to deploy the Base Unit
II product to maintain consistency across their
network. We currently have no definite plans to
discontinue the Base Unit II. We will continue to
stock it as long as customers continue to buy it
fairly regularly. After that, we will likely keep it
available for purchase on a build to order basis as
long as it is economically feasible to do so.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to
email us at
cust...@packetflux.com
