A Preseem Success Story

Find out directly from the CEO of this Montana-based WISP how they reduced support calls by 25% immediately after installing Preseem.

Limited Visibility Into Customer Experience

By Jason Pond, CEO, Grizzly Broadband

In this day and age, the ability to detect internal Wi-Fi problems is ever increasing. This is the overwhelming issue we’ve seen that causes customers to dislike, and become disgruntled with, their ISPs. The need to have QoE is there. In fact, at this stage in the game, if you’re not doing something to handle the quality of the subscriber experience, you’re failing your customers.

One thing that I am big into is detailed data. So here are some numbers for you.

Prior to Preseem handling all of our shaping, we were averaging 384 support calls per week.

Now that we have had Preseem running for the past two-and-a-half months, our support call volume has gone down to an average of 288 calls per week (which would be even lower but we had a couple of large-scale outages due to FreeRADIUS failures). This change was immediately seen the week after we started having Preseem do all of our shaping, and has been trending downwards since.

Now this is cool data and all, but a caveat: it was not just magic. You don’t put the Preseem box in and all your problems go away. We have a network team that has worked diligently to resolve overloaded APs, balance towers, and create an overall exceptional experience for customers. We were not able to see detailed information prior to Preseem.

Proactive Network Insights with Preseem

One of the big things that we noticed were customers that had called in to upgrade to a faster package, such as a 32Mb/s when they had only a 10Mb/s or 20Mb/s license on their Cambium radios. This created a bad experience for the customer.

Moreover, it would have been very grueling process for us to find all of these customers, as with Cambium there is no easy way. Now, with Preseem, we can pretty easily see these customers in an AP and get their key upgraded.

We looked into other solutions such as Saisei, Procera, and Sandvine, but were not pleased with the integration, sales techniques, or prices. I met Preseem CEO Gerrit Nagelhout a few years ago when he was pushing out a product to cache Netflix programs on a thumb drive hooked up to a MikroTik router. Pretty slick idea! One thing that I noticed was that Gerrit was forward-thinking. My very first interaction with Preseem was probably at the Sonar booth at WISPAPALOOZA a couple of years ago. When we were deciding to move to Sonar as our billing platform with Preseem fully integrated, we knew it was the right choice. We had heard from other ISPs using both and things were working very well.

Overall, we have had a very good experience with Preseem thus far. Their support has been very responsive. We did deal with a hardware issue and they were fantastic to work with. It’s easy to reach out and get help when needed, and they trained and walked us through the whole process. The appliances are not inexpensive, but they are not horribly priced. And are WORTH EVERY SINGLE PENNY.

Uncovering the Root Cause Behind Months of Connectivity Issues

This customer was having problems with their service and complained of being disconnected all the time. They kept reporting that everything had not worked well in months.

With the help of Preseem, Grizzly offered a managed router (the Calix GigaCenter) and installed it. This shows where the Calix router made a self-heal adjustment.

Grizzly had come to find out that they were being interfered with by their neighbors, causing high latency and for the customer’s gamer son to get very frustrated.

Eliminating Chronic Buffering Issues

These customers were complaining of continuous buffering issues and that the Internet was just not working right. At the beginning of the graph you can see the high latency.

Grizzly did a service call and replaced the cable and installed a managed router and their problems were resolved. This problem had been ongoing for almost a year prior to this.

From Bandwidth Constraints to Seamless Streaming

This customer was running on a radio that was a 10Mb/s license key on our 10Mb/s team member Internet package. You can see where we made the key upgrade.

Now, this team member—who works for Grizzly—has two sons and they had no problems streaming on multiple TVs while this was going on, which Grizzly attributes to Preseem doing its job.

Turning on shaping with Preseem was a breeze—it was the easiest part of the process.

Prior to Preseem, we were using PPPoE and MikroTik queues. The Preseem box handles things much better.

In closing, Preseem is a great company to work with. They’re providing a solution that is simple to implement and cost-effective to use. It helps with the customer experience, which to me is the ultimate ability.

If you have the tools to be able to serve your customers the best, wouldn’t you want to use them? Wouldn’t you want to make sure that your business was not just another pesky ISP that doesn’t provide what it’s paid for? Preseem is a step in the right direction.