But as I brought up > last time I remember discussing this > a decade ago, I also want to be able to pay MikroTik MORE money, in order to receive better support. It’s all well and good to say that MT is committed to providing “enterprise level software”, but I’d also like some enterprise level > support > to go with my enterprise software, please and thank you.
1000% this… Even Ubiq… is now offering paid support. As they’ve gotten bad rap and trashed over years for not having such. MikroTik software flexibility is much better, however. But the software or hardware [Wireless] is a problem. Look at recent wireless post from a long-time user who had a FAILED MikroTik wireless deployment for a school… that is a sour taste for a long-time advocate.
If there was paid support, I am sure this customer would have had much higher chance for a successful deployment… Perhaps even publish a case study…
It seems like it is obviously not sustainable to offer amazing support, for free, to everyone, to go along with amazing software that is priced the way it is. The cracks have been evident in the support model for a while, which just leads to frustrations all around. Now, by all means: keep the regular free support option available. I think it’s great to have that on offer. But for those who need both faster response times as well as bug and/or feature prioritization, there are those of us who would love to be able to pay you more in exchange for that. Yes, I am nervous that offering such a thing – at least if architected the wrong way – could lead to shifting perverse incentives at MT HQ. But there has to be a way to do something like this in a sustainable fashion that is good for both MT and the customers who need this sort of thing.
In the very early days, MT had a paid “extended support program”, but it didn’t last long for > understandable reasons> . That was also a long time ago, though, and MikroTik was a much smaller operation back then. It might make sense to re-visit that decision.
Since the discontinuation of the ESP, the party line from MikroTik has been that if you want to pay somebody for a higher level of support than you can get from MikroTik, you can always avail yourself of a certified consultant. But that is NOT a solution to the problem. Certified consultants and trainers have ZERO access to the codebase. 9 out of 10 times, what I want to be able to > pay extra > for when it comes to “enterprise support” is not mere hand-holding. What I want is to be able to log a ticket about what I suspect is a bonafide software bug, have this bug report get turbo’d up to the MT software devs to be reproduced and verified, and once it has been, to get a fix EXPEDITED, rather than sit in a queue along with everybody else’s reports (and miscellaneous hand-holding support requests) for the next 6+ months. It would also be most excellent if we could even pay for the privilege of having some bug fixes get backported to older long-term releases (as long as it is feasible).
I concur with your thoughts. Their “free” support model is not sustainable. Their ticketing and support email inbox gets hammered, who know’s what their process is like and how they filter or triage the incoming tickets…
Yes, Certified trainers are STILL on their own island. It is up to the individual, with their overall MikroTik and network knowledge/experience to be able to address issues for most deployments. But when there are real bugs or non-starter issues, where do we go?
What I want is to be able to log a ticket about what I suspect is a bonafide software bug, have this bug report get turbo’d up to the MT software devs to be reproduced and verified, and once it has been, to get a fix EXPEDITED, rather than sit in a queue along with everybody else’s reports (and miscellaneous hand-holding support requests) for the next 6+ months. It would also be most excellent if we could even pay for the privilege of having some bug fixes get backported to older long-term releases (as long as it is feasible).What I want is to be able to log a ticket about what I suspect is a bonafide software bug, have this bug report get turbo’d up to the MT software devs to be reproduced and verified, and once it has been, to get a fix EXPEDITED, rather than sit in a queue along with everybody else’s reports (and miscellaneous hand-holding support requests) for the next 6+ months. It would also be most excellent if we could even pay for the privilege of having some bug fixes get backported to older long-term releases (as long as it is feasible).
This goes a long way..