It's been love-hate. We've actually been using it since January 2008, for billing and scheduling, tracking leads, etc. We purchased the Imagestream Rebel router to work as the Bandwidth Manager Unit (BMU) later that year, but never put it into place. This was primarily because we didn't trust Powercode tech support to help us when we had a problem with it.
Things were dicey & sketchy with Powercode for awhile. We think the tide has turned with the company, being bought out by Bertram Wireless. We like better what's going on with them now, and we have upgraded to their version 9 with a substantial increase in monthly cost. We did this because we wanted the bandwidth management integrated with our billing platform, so that a low-cost customer service agent could pretty much help a customer with whatever their needs were. We felt that it was time to "make or break" with Powercode, or switch to another platform (painful but maybe necessary). Powercode, the company, has been working well with us to resolve our problems. They seem to care about having our business more than they used to, as they are responding to us and addressing our concerns. In fact, the other day, I requested a new feature...seemed like a simple one but most times feature requests fall on deaf ears. Powercode has built-in troubleshooting utilities like ping-flood (web-interfaced billing server initiates the command and the BMU runs it and reports back the results to the billing server then back to your web browser). Well, I wanted those results to be logged in the customer account (PC has EXTENSIVE logging). A week later, that feature was released on an update. Now, whenever any customer service agent runs a troubleshooting utility in Powercode, it is logged on the customer account and stored forever. So, we immediately began having our installers running their tests from within Powercode before they leave the install. Now we have 3 tests logged for initial performance of the connection. Anyway... pretty good turn-around on my request. I was at a turning point a few months ago, sending out an email to everyone to begin searching for a new OSS because we weren't 100% on our features. Being 100% on features, I felt, will save us about .5 FTE. If we aren't there, and are paying the high price of v9 Powercode...not worth it. They're working with us and I hope to be 100% in a week or so. Their new pricing has good economy of scale, too...affordable from day one...expensive in numbers but advanced features will save you people time at this point. All-in-all, still I think it has been a positive adventure with Powercode. I'm glad the product has a better managed company behind it now. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Dueck" <m...@netking.bz> To: <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 12:50 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Overage thresholds and penalties > How is your experience with Powercode? I once considered putting in > Powercode, but it looked to be a little used product, so decided against > it. > > On 04/30/2010 10:24 AM, Mark Nash - Lists wrote: >> We use Powercode to shape bandwidth and to track bandwidth usage, and >> when >> the customer goes over the limit, they are throttled down very hard, like >> 64k. Powercode has a Customer Portal feature that lets them login and >> check >> their usage any time they want. Also, they can set up daily emails from >> their Portal so that they can get an email each day about their monthly >> usage. We have about 20 customers that do this. >> >> Took us a while to get the Powercode system to work, and it's still not >> 100%, but I would say that putting in these usage thresholds and tracking >> has helped us identify who our heavy users are and to deal with them >> appropriately. Doing this has generated about $500/mo in additional >> revenue >> as customers move up to higher speed packages with higher monthly limits. >> > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
