Improvement to service

[Starfox]

I’m back with another 2-1/2 cents (now a nickel) worth of thoughts, this time regarding service in general.

It’s been quite publicized that there are only 2 nodes for Visible customers at the moment, one in NJ and one in CO. And if for some reason you end up getting stuck on the opposite coast, because of failover, maintenance or whatever, you end up with high pings and bad routing until you request a SIM reset/reprovision.

I’m guessing that the core isn’t intelligent enough to route people on the right coast to the NJ node and the wrong coast to the CO node when it’s ok to do so, instead sending all those packets criss-cross country

• Allow user to request a SIM reprovision through the app. Rate limit it, say once/hour max 4/day or something if it causes issues. That way if the user notices some issue they can try to fix it without first involving support.
• Show the node being used in the app. It shouldn’t take resorting to 3rd party apps to determine latency or speed issues, and just wastes bandwidth needlessly.
• Notify users of issues in general, such as node maintenance or general outage. Most cloud service providers do that, no reason why Visible can’t.

That’s all I have for now.

— Starfox

[devin37354]

Actually Visible has been very transparent about maintenance issues and performing maintenance. I get notifications in the app and via email. Maybe not everyone gets these. I do agree with the other points though!

[frugalfamily]

@Starfox yes a self serve troubleshooting element would definitely take things up a notch and ease support traffic as well. Great job pulling this together! 💯

[MVNOResearch]

The network is intelligent enough to route you to the core that's closest to you.  That always happens unless one is shut down for a short time for upgrades/maintenance, which mostly occurs every now again during the middle of the night.  I agree with the self-provisioning button, and will raise that with the network team.  However, I do have good news - we plan to add two new nodes this year if all goes according to plan - one in the West and one in the South, which should help immensely with latency in those areas.  Don't ask me for more specific timelines - I don't want to commit to a date and then we push it back.  

[NICHOLLSJL]

Yes, please add the re-provisioning button. My daughters phone had an app crash the phone right when it was provisioning the SIMS, waited an hour in live chat just to have the app crash when we only had 1 person in front of us. I give up today. So frustrating 

[snappyapple632]

Thanks for sharing about the nodes, MVNOR. Latency hasn't really been an issue for me since I don't play online games on my phone that much, but I would appreciate a more responsive network experience.