I had the rare opportunity today to attend a meeting with several of our biggest members and some of our staff. This is a technical planning meeting about some “new stuff” we’re looking to do in partnership with them.
The meeting was really good, and I think we’ve got a great solution (thank you Brad Fleming). But the meeting ended early, and we all stayed to talk. I started listening to the member technical folks talking to each other about a number of things they’re doing.
I was amazed at how often the word “KanREN” came up in their discussions. I’ll give one example here that really makes the point. They were talking about phones, and I listened to more than one of them talk about how KanREN picked up their voice traffic on a different port, transported it to the SIP trunk provider as priority traffic, etc.
In every case, I know this is something we just did for them. We didn’t charge anything, nothing one-time, nothing recurring. We just did it. Then I remembered some conversations with another member who did something similar, but didn’t work with us. I know that they ended up paying for a dedicated circuit from a 3rd party carrier with a multi-year commitment… You get the point.
Throughout the entire conversation, I kept hearing things like this come up. It’s nice reassurance that we are doing our job, and these members are getting a huge amount more than “Internet” from us. The best part of all was that every time KanREN’s part of the picture came briefing into focus, it was alway just a given…. Yeah, no problems because KanREN just did that for us.
This makes me feel good. I think about our staff mostly — the people who are actually interfacing with these people all of the time — and that they’re doing a great job making sure we keep true to our cause and do what I keep promising we’re doing.