Re: OOB management options @ 60 Hudson & 1 Summer

["Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>]

On Apr 16, 2021, at 1:49 PM, Warren Kumari <warren () kumari net> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 1:08 PM Bryan Fields <Bryan () bryanfields net> wrote:
> > On 4/16/21 1:33 AM, Saku Ytti wrote:
> > https://www.markleygroup.com/cloud/network/out-of-band
>
> Wow, this is an impressive offering.  I wish more providers would do this.
>
> +manylots. It's always surprising to me how often companies (in all industries) can be broken up into those that 
> understand the value of goodwill and those that instead nickel-and-dime.
> My local Potbelly (sandwich ship) every now and then will just say "No charge, this one's on us". This only happens 
> around once every 30-40 times I go in, but they loyalty that it has created means that I go there **way** more often 
> than I otherwise would. It also means that in the few times that something goes wrong/I have a bad experience, I 
> don't really care.
>
> The additional profit that they've made from having me as a loyal customer more than covers the cost of 1 free 
> sammich every N. 
>
> In many ways Markley seems similar - they feel like they understand that some things (like OOB) are annoying to deal 
> with, and that the loyalty / goodwill provided by being "nice" more than repays the cost of the service.

As the person who created that product for Markley, I can tell you that is precisely what we were thinking.

It cost us nearly nothing, made customers stickier, generated good will, and created a chance to talk to them about 
cloud offerings or similar. The only “catch” is you need a fiber xconn. The thinking was it was barely more than a 
copper xconn for POTS yet you get gigabit instead of dialup, or you would have used fiber to another ISP anyway.

Every serious colo has enough bandwidth that 2 Mbps won’t be noticed, competent network engineers (one hopes), and free 
switch ports (or can get them cheap). Why don’t they do this? Perhaps someone in finance feels it can be “monetized”. I 
feel the monetization lowers adoption and kills the other benefits Warren mentions above - which are worth a hell of a 
lot more than the paltry sum they would get from billing a few customers.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

PS: The guest SSID at Markley has no captive portal. It was a problem for customers who wanted to have their equipment 
get on the wifi to download images, etc, so we took it off.