On 16 Dec 2020, at 15.49, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com> wrote:
With the covid19 situation, obviously lots of ISPs have their NOC personnel working from home, with VPN (or remote desktop) access to all the internal tools, VoIP at home, etc.
In the traditional sense, by "showpiece NOC" I mean a room designed for the purpose of having large situational awareness displays on a wall, network weathermaps and charts, alerting systems, composed of four or more big flat panel displays. Ideally configured to be actually useful for NOC purposes and also something impressive looking for customer tours.
To what extent potential customers find that sort of thing to be a signifier of seriousness on the part of an ISP, I suppose depends on what sort of customers they are, and their relative degree of technical sophistication.
Are the days of such an environment gone forever?
It seems like the "something impressive looking" might just change. Add a bit of marketing copy about how "our monitoring is distributed, just like our servers" (or some more punchy variant) and show customers what the smaller monitoring stations WFH employees are using look like.