Following up on the previous email about product ideas, I have an idea for a product which at least I think would be really cool, but I also think would likely be a big flop, just because of the apparent cost sensitivity of installs.
It seems to me that it would be nice to replace the power injector at customer sites with more of an intelligent device. One that provides functionality like traffic metering, cable diagnostics, customer-location speed tests, and so on. The unit would have jacks for the radio, the customer equipment, and power. It would also have a display which shows real-time usage data for the customer to be able to determine for themselves what their current internet consumption is. There are a lot of natural outgrowths from this such as watchdog reset of the radio itself, automatic problem notification to the WISP, etc. My goal would be to instrument this as much as possible. If you think of this as a 'smart power meter' for internet, with diagnostic tools built in, then you've got the basic idea. This is not intended to replace the customer router/nat device, and will only be a Layer 2 device as far as traffic goes. There will likely be some limited traffic shaping possible based on the underlying ethernet swtich chipset. Unfortunately, these can't be a $20 device. $75 might be doable for higher volumes, but $100 is more in the comfort zone for the volumes I typically move. Of course, this is a CPE device and I'm not even sure how many I'd sell so these prices are guesses at best - but more likely to go down instead of up. Although I suspect most people would love to have one of these at each install, I have a hard time believing that most people would swallow adding even $75 to the cost of each install, let alone the $100 which might be the price I'd have to hit for lower volume. Is this a fair assumption? Would you add such a device to each install?
