Sterling,
This sounds like an easy task, but I can tell you as someone that is
currently developing software, and is starting December 1 to build a
simple iPhone app, software development is very expensive. My app is a
pretty simple... easy to use front-end with a cloud based database
back-end... yet the quotes I have gotten are $50,000 - $75,000. This is
from 3 different development companies all based in Utah. All of them
are busy and each has 20+ full-time developers working for them, so they
have enough business and must not be totally out of line on their quotes.
I said this 10+ years ago, and I'll say it again... customer service is
the only thing that makes you different than the big cable and telco
companies. Having a live person that can help people troubleshoot and
fix issues is the key to keeping people with your service. If you are
just going to send them to an app on their phones, you become the same
as every other provider... and your service becomes a commodity just
like everyone else.
Travis
On 11/20/2014 1:49 PM, Sterling Jacobson via Af wrote:
BUT, the phones now days are smart enough to know when wifi sucks or goes out
completely.
They fall back to 3/4G.
Which is awesome, because it could still talk to the service provider end and
tell the customer the status.
I think this would work better than a green/red light.
The phone App would tell you that your service is correct to the house, but
that inside it's not talking.
Then walk the customer through a set of standard fix it routines.
That would solve most of our calls right there.
On the back end it just needs to talk to a server process that can get access
to the device on the side of the house.
The best would be an embedded speed test in the ONT/CPE that could report back
to the App and say they are getting what they are paying for to the side of
their house. And then give them suggestions for fixing their crappy wifi.
I bet it wouldn't take much to get this done and working with a few larger
billing systems and equipment platforms, who's with me??
-----Original Message-----
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof via Af
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 12:35 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Part of the problem is so many customers are 100% WiFi now, so unless you have
a managed router there, you have 2 big problem areas beyond the demarc - the
customer's router and the customer's WiFi.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Prince via Af
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 1:04 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Linktechs built a tool a couple years ago that ran on the customer's PC (WIndows only)
that would give the customer a "connection health"
indication. It would monitor the local gateway, and give both a green light
for connected, plus a reading on the latency. You go too much beyond that, and
you will get a bunch of false positives when something beyond your local
network is having some kind of issue (we get our share of these).
I don't think they got much response from it, and I don't think they offer it
any longer.
bp
<part-15@SkylineBroadbandService>
On 11/20/2014 9:43 AM, Sterling Jacobson via Af wrote:
What I really want is an integrated system that isn't stuck in the 90's.
I want the customer to have an app on their phone that tells them when
their network is having issues and why.
I want it to also remind them to pay their bill and provide a
lazy/easy way to do that.
I want that same system to have an engineer app that tells us when
nodes fail and why.
So if a node goes down and it's important, it should show up on my
phone and I can take action.
One of those actions would be to message to outage impacted customers
the ETA to fix etc.
Emails from Cacti don't count.
