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raytaylor
join:2009-07-28

raytaylor to soamz

Member

to soamz

Re: [Tech Ops] DHCP or Static IP for WISP customers ?

said by soamz:

So, whats the final best suggestion for a new WISP who is expecting to expand to 2000 customers in a year and more in more years ?

I need to make sure, I start the right way, so I dont have to go again and change things again and again.

Go with powercode from day 1 then
soamz
join:2015-02-24
India

soamz

Member

said by raytaylor:

Go with powercode from day 1 then

How does Powercode help for IP ?
I thought, its only the billing manager.
Mike_27
Premium Member
join:2004-05-15
Gardiner, MT

Mike_27

Premium Member

power code will do all (most) of the provisioning too.

TomS_
Git-r-done
MVM
join:2002-07-19
London, UK

TomS_ to soamz

MVM

to soamz
The odds of getting enough IPs to cover your future customer base are quite limited now. APNIC covers India, and they ran out of substantial IP reserves years ago. They are now on contingency, which means I think you can get a /23 or /22 tops and thats it. Check their website to work out what your options are.

Beyond that you'll need to go to the market to buy IPs from someone else.

To begin with you may be able to get away assigning IPs to customers directly, but beyond that youre going to need to NAT or buy more IPs from somewhere.

Inssomniak
The Glitch
Premium Member
join:2005-04-06
Cayuga, ON

1 recommendation

Inssomniak to soamz

Premium Member

to soamz
said by soamz:

So, whats the final best suggestion for a new WISP who is expecting to expand to 2000 customers in a year and more in more years ?

I need to make sure, I start the right way, so I dont have to go again and change things again and again.

I have to say Im confused with you. You expect to do 2000 customers in the first year? But Cant afford a good spectrum analyzer as pointed out in another thread.
The money and resources required for 2000 customers, or even 1000 customers in the first year is enormous $$$.. Ubiquiti would not be my choice of equipment for it either in that density.
You are going to need a spectrum analyzer on hand all the time.
raytaylor
join:2009-07-28

raytaylor to soamz

Member

to soamz
said by soamz:

said by raytaylor:

Go with powercode from day 1 then

How does Powercode help for IP ?
I thought, its only the billing manager.

Powercode runs the DHCP server, your invoicing, customer payments, client portal, limits your customers to their plan speeds, counts the data, runs your ticketing system, monitors customer radios and signal levels, and everything else. Its the complete software solution to running an ISP. All this stuff you need - and so rather than using a bunch of different opensource or "cheap" systems that are not integrated.

Once you get to about 250 customers, different back end systems become difficult to manage. Eg. you need to set up an account for your customer in your radius server, ticketing system, dhcp or ip reservation, radio monitoring system etc. Its much easier to use a single system that is designed to do it all.

And if after 12 months you expect to have 2000 customers, then you would be switching to powercode approx 2 months in. So you might as well start with powercode from day 1
popcorrin
join:2009-03-11

popcorrin

Member

We looked at powercode. It's just so dang expensive. Plus you rely on the appliance. Also from what I've read it has trouble with traffic shaping.
Does have alot of nice features though.

TomS_
Git-r-done
MVM
join:2002-07-19
London, UK

TomS_ to raytaylor

MVM

to raytaylor
Ive used a ticketing system in the past called RT, you dont need to set up an account for users to be able to use it (although you can if you really want to.)

They just send an email to an address which feeds in to an RT queue and that creates a ticket that you can look at. Any updates you put in the ticket are emailed to the customer (unless its a comment), and the customer can reply back to you just by hitting reply to the email.

Otherwise, a lot of these things could be automated if they are open source. Most open source software uses similarly open source databases, and the schema can be acquired just by looking at the code, so it would be quite easy to write a script that goes and does a bunch of inserts and what not to set up all manner of user accounts.

Once you start investing yourself in proprietary systems the ability to integrate lessens, unless they have an API.