Frankly, I think the days of the "showpiece NOC" being relevant ended a while before COVID. I worked at a Tier 1 for >10 years in a customer-facing capacity, largely dealing with "serious" enterprise customers. The number of customers who toured the NOC in that time was less than 5 (i.e much less than 1%), despite generally offering it up to new and quickly-scaling customers. I actually spent more time visiting customer NOCs over that time than I did my own with customers (and some of theirs were more impressive anyway).

Now, I did spend a lot of time coordinating calls between the NOC and customers, some of which was in the break-fix, mea culpa sort of vain, but also a lot of "spend time getting comfortable" types of conversations too, especially with customers considering their first service. So it wasn't that folks didn't care about what was going on there inasmuch as they recognized (quite rightfully IMO) that they weren't going to get any value being there that they couldn't get meeting the folks and learning about operational procedures, etc. over a conference call, so why waste the time/money to travel for that sort of thing?

I don't know if I have a biased sample or if this is reflective of the norm these days, but the "NOC Tour" was something that didn't get executed on very often.

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 3:51 PM 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?