Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
That would be cool! marlon -Original Message- From: wi...@metrocom.ca Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2013 4:24 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I have them at the office, so I can send them when I am back, but I have a better idea. I am getting a quote from a media production company to make a WISP version of these videos, with the ability to throw the logo of a WISP and the url into the video along with a few customized lines of text like, All of us a XYZ WISP are please to explain to you how our bandwidth management plans work - If enough companies signed up, we should be able to make it cheap enough for everyone to have a custom-made video. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Do you have a link to some of the videos Daniel? Might be helpful for us to send them to our customers or those that call for information. thanks, marlon -Original Message- From: wi...@metrocom.ca Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 8:21 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Marlon has the right idea. I have been looking at what ATT is doing to lay the groundwork for pay-as-you-go bandwidth - you can see some of their 'informational' videos on YouTube - and essentially they are setting a really high limit on usage in GB terms, and then billing above that so as to hit the bandwidth hogs. They are phasing it in, and giving people usage meters and alerts to show their usage patterns, but it all leads to having a way for them to tackle the small minority who take an outsize share of the bandwidth, and I have to say they do a good job of making that point clear in those videos. Next year we will also introduce the same sort of tiered fair-use/flat rate plans to enable us to segment the customer base, and most likely do that in the same way as they are. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Offer a choice to them. $100++ for a speed limited but bit “unlimited” (read that to mean high threshold) plan. Or, $40 for a lower usage plan with smaller steps for higher than average but non disruptive customers. And remember, the high usage customers are costing more than they are paying. You are better off to loose x% of your customer base than to keep them. Pass those folks to your competition and let them die trying to figure out how to support them. And never forget, we are not the only ones having this problem. The big guys are feeling it far worse than we are, we just don’t hear about it as much. And in the next few years the compression mechanisms will get better, AP’s will start to ship with built in cache systems, more data will fit down the same pipe etc. We’ll be able to deliver these services to people sooner than later, just have to stay in business long enough to let the technologies catch up to what the markets are really asking for. marlon From: Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Everyone runs just as fast as we can make them go. We don’t care how fast or how far you drive your car, all we care about is how much fuel it takes to go where you want to go. marlon From: Sam Tetherow Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 3:26 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions For those that do strictly usage based billing, are your customer connections wide open or do you do some sort of rate limit as well? On 10/08/2013 05:19 PM, Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) wrote: We’ve done usage based billing since day one. We’ve lost roughly 15% of our customer base over the last couple of years because of it. But the ones we’ve lost are the ones that think they should be able to give up a $100 per month cable bill and replace it with a $0 increase internet bill (keep that same ol’ $40/month account but do $100+++ more with it). We’re starting to get a few of them back. And our growth in other areas (non high usage customers) has still exceeded the losses. Plus we have the reputation for being the fastest, most reliable provider in the area. Probably the cheapest too. The best part is that we’ve flooded our competitor’s systems. Even the telco has put a freeze on new DSL customers in some of the areas around here. Last night a customer told me that the telco told them (moving into a house that already had DSL) that they were going to freeze the customer base where it’s at for an unknown length of time. laters, marlon From: Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 2:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Do you have a link to some of the videos Daniel? Might be helpful for us to send them to our customers or those that call for information. thanks, marlon -Original Message- From: wi...@metrocom.ca Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 8:21 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Marlon has the right idea. I have been looking at what ATT is doing to lay the groundwork for pay-as-you-go bandwidth - you can see some of their 'informational' videos on YouTube - and essentially they are setting a really high limit on usage in GB terms, and then billing above that so as to hit the bandwidth hogs. They are phasing it in, and giving people usage meters and alerts to show their usage patterns, but it all leads to having a way for them to tackle the small minority who take an outsize share of the bandwidth, and I have to say they do a good job of making that point clear in those videos. Next year we will also introduce the same sort of tiered fair-use/flat rate plans to enable us to segment the customer base, and most likely do that in the same way as they are. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Offer a choice to them. $100++ for a speed limited but bit “unlimited” (read that to mean high threshold) plan. Or, $40 for a lower usage plan with smaller steps for higher than average but non disruptive customers. And remember, the high usage customers are costing more than they are paying. You are better off to loose x% of your customer base than to keep them. Pass those folks to your competition and let them die trying to figure out how to support them. And never forget, we are not the only ones having this problem. The big guys are feeling it far worse than we are, we just don’t hear about it as much. And in the next few years the compression mechanisms will get better, AP’s will start to ship with built in cache systems, more data will fit down the same pipe etc. We’ll be able to deliver these services to people sooner than later, just have to stay in business long enough to let the technologies catch up to what the markets are really asking for. marlon From: Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a “pipe”, so let’s use a related analogy; You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 – 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
I have them at the office, so I can send them when I am back, but I have a better idea. I am getting a quote from a media production company to make a WISP version of these videos, with the ability to throw the logo of a WISP and the url into the video along with a few customized lines of text like, All of us a XYZ WISP are please to explain to you how our bandwidth management plans work - If enough companies signed up, we should be able to make it cheap enough for everyone to have a custom-made video. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Do you have a link to some of the videos Daniel? Might be helpful for us to send them to our customers or those that call for information. thanks, marlon -Original Message- From: wi...@metrocom.ca Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 8:21 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Marlon has the right idea. I have been looking at what ATT is doing to lay the groundwork for pay-as-you-go bandwidth - you can see some of their 'informational' videos on YouTube - and essentially they are setting a really high limit on usage in GB terms, and then billing above that so as to hit the bandwidth hogs. They are phasing it in, and giving people usage meters and alerts to show their usage patterns, but it all leads to having a way for them to tackle the small minority who take an outsize share of the bandwidth, and I have to say they do a good job of making that point clear in those videos. Next year we will also introduce the same sort of tiered fair-use/flat rate plans to enable us to segment the customer base, and most likely do that in the same way as they are. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Offer a choice to them. $100++ for a speed limited but bit “unlimited” (read that to mean high threshold) plan. Or, $40 for a lower usage plan with smaller steps for higher than average but non disruptive customers. And remember, the high usage customers are costing more than they are paying. You are better off to loose x% of your customer base than to keep them. Pass those folks to your competition and let them die trying to figure out how to support them. And never forget, we are not the only ones having this problem. The big guys are feeling it far worse than we are, we just don’t hear about it as much. And in the next few years the compression mechanisms will get better, AP’s will start to ship with built in cache systems, more data will fit down the same pipe etc. We’ll be able to deliver these services to people sooner than later, just have to stay in business long enough to let the technologies catch up to what the markets are really asking for. marlon From: Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
We’ve done usage based billing since day one. We’ve lost roughly 15% of our customer base over the last couple of years because of it. But the ones we’ve lost are the ones that think they should be able to give up a $100 per month cable bill and replace it with a $0 increase internet bill (keep that same ol’ $40/month account but do $100+++ more with it). We’re starting to get a few of them back. And our growth in other areas (non high usage customers) has still exceeded the losses. Plus we have the reputation for being the fastest, most reliable provider in the area. Probably the cheapest too. The best part is that we’ve flooded our competitor’s systems. Even the telco has put a freeze on new DSL customers in some of the areas around here. Last night a customer told me that the telco told them (moving into a house that already had DSL) that they were going to freeze the customer base where it’s at for an unknown length of time. laters, marlon From: Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 2:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
For those that do strictly usage based billing, are your customer connections wide open or do you do some sort of rate limit as well? On 10/08/2013 05:19 PM, Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) wrote: We've done usage based billing since day one. We've lost roughly 15% of our customer base over the last couple of years because of it. But the ones we've lost are the ones that think they should be able to give up a $100 per month cable bill and replace it with a $0 increase internet bill (keep that same ol' $40/month account but do $100+++ more with it). We're starting to get a few of them back. And our growth in other areas (non high usage customers) has still exceeded the losses. Plus we have the reputation for being the fastest, most reliable provider in the area. Probably the cheapest too. The best part is that we've flooded our competitor's systems. Even the telco has put a freeze on new DSL customers in some of the areas around here. Last night a customer told me that the telco told them (moving into a house that already had DSL) that they were going to freeze the customer base where it's at for an unknown length of time. laters, marlon *From:* Fred Goldstein mailto:fgoldst...@ionary.com *Sent:* Wednesday, September 25, 2013 2:55 PM *To:* wireless@wispa.org mailto:wireless@wispa.org *Subject:* Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what's a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Offer a choice to them. $100++ for a speed limited but bit “unlimited” (read that to mean high threshold) plan. Or, $40 for a lower usage plan with smaller steps for higher than average but non disruptive customers. And remember, the high usage customers are costing more than they are paying. You are better off to loose x% of your customer base than to keep them. Pass those folks to your competition and let them die trying to figure out how to support them. And never forget, we are not the only ones having this problem. The big guys are feeling it far worse than we are, we just don’t hear about it as much. And in the next few years the compression mechanisms will get better, AP’s will start to ship with built in cache systems, more data will fit down the same pipe etc. We’ll be able to deliver these services to people sooner than later, just have to stay in business long enough to let the technologies catch up to what the markets are really asking for. marlon From: Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a “pipe”, so let’s use a related analogy; You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 – 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load. With a family of 5 in each house, it’s easy to see that , despite the smaller service pipe, that house number 1 will have many times the water usage as house number 2. A smaller pipe did nothing to control the flow because the flow limit of the pipe was not reached. Those two pipes are exactly like a 3 meg and 5 meg Internet connection. Within reason, the size of the pipe will do little to limit heavy bandwidth usage. It only serves to spread it out, creating a longer period of time that it puts a demand on our networks. Like most, we saw our network performance begin to deteriorate as Netflix switched from a physical to a digital delivery system. The others since then have continued to slow our once speedy connections. Now we, as an industry, are faced with a continued rebuild to meet a voracious demand for bandwidth to deliver content that we never intended, or anticipated. Worse yet, we are being positioned to provide these improvements to support the business model of companies that barely acknowledge our existence. And they are getting smarter in their use of our pipes. There was a time when if you didn’t have a good 4.5 meg flow, Netflix would not stream. They have gone to much more advanced encoding
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Marlon has the right idea. I have been looking at what ATT is doing to lay the groundwork for pay-as-you-go bandwidth - you can see some of their 'informational' videos on YouTube - and essentially they are setting a really high limit on usage in GB terms, and then billing above that so as to hit the bandwidth hogs. They are phasing it in, and giving people usage meters and alerts to show their usage patterns, but it all leads to having a way for them to tackle the small minority who take an outsize share of the bandwidth, and I have to say they do a good job of making that point clear in those videos. Next year we will also introduce the same sort of tiered fair-use/flat rate plans to enable us to segment the customer base, and most likely do that in the same way as they are. Daniel Marlon Schafer (509.982.2181) o...@odessaoffice.com wrote .. Offer a choice to them. $100++ for a speed limited but bit “unlimited” (read that to mean high threshold) plan. Or, $40 for a lower usage plan with smaller steps for higher than average but non disruptive customers. And remember, the high usage customers are costing more than they are paying. You are better off to loose x% of your customer base than to keep them. Pass those folks to your competition and let them die trying to figure out how to support them. And never forget, we are not the only ones having this problem. The big guys are feeling it far worse than we are, we just don’t hear about it as much. And in the next few years the compression mechanisms will get better, AP’s will start to ship with built in cache systems, more data will fit down the same pipe etc. We’ll be able to deliver these services to people sooner than later, just have to stay in business long enough to let the technologies catch up to what the markets are really asking for. marlon From: Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 8:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a “pipe”, so let’s use a related analogy; You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 – 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load. With a family of 5 in each house, it’s easy to see that , despite the smaller service pipe, that house number 1 will have many times the water usage as house number 2. A smaller pipe did nothing to control the flow because the flow limit of the pipe was not reached. Those two pipes are exactly like a 3 meg and 5 meg Internet
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Joe, for 1 reason, you have the fact that others are already doing it. My ATT 6 meg / 768 k circuit started out at unmetered for $19.99 per month. Then it went to 29.99 per month. Then came the 150 gig cap and $ 10 per each additional 50 gigs, then the base rate went to $34.95, and with my overages (Netflix) I ended up paying $55 per month. I started shopping, and Charter cable does the same cap, but no overage, they reserve the right to up your tier or cancel your service. I ended up going Charter small business with 20 meg down and 3 meg up advertised, and 5 static IPs with no caps for $ 99.00 per month. Are your clients going to push back? Yes, some of them will. Are some of them going to cancel service? Same answer.You just need to figure out the best way to get from here to there. John Joe Miller joe.mil...@dslbyair.com wrote: Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the unlimited platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. Im looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a pipe, so lets use a related analogy; You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load. With a family of 5 in each house, its easy to see that , despite the smaller service pipe, that house number 1 will have many times the water usage as house number 2. A smaller pipe did nothing to control the flow because the flow limit of the pipe was not reached. Those two pipes are exactly like a 3 meg and 5 meg Internet connection. Within reason, the size of the pipe will do little to limit heavy bandwidth usage. It only serves to spread it out, creating a longer period of time that it puts a demand on our networks. Like most, we saw our network performance begin to deteriorate as Netflix switched from a physical to a digital delivery system. The others since then have continued to slow our once speedy connections. Now we, as an industry, are faced with a continued rebuild to meet a voracious demand for bandwidth to deliver content that we never intended, or anticipated. Worse yet, we are being positioned to provide these improvements to support the business model of companies that barely acknowledge our existence. And they are getting smarter in their use of our pipes. There was a time when if you didnt have a good 4.5 meg flow, Netflix would not stream. They have gone to much more advanced encoding that will adjust to feeds of less than 2 megs, rendering a 3 meg rate limit useless in defending against them. The issue of Net Neutrality somehow became synonymous with no caps. It appears we are the only service that is viewed by consumers and governments that should be given away. Services like water
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Also, if your billing systems allow for it, you probably want 3 tiers, minimal users, average users, and streaming users. John Joe Fiero joe1...@optonline.net wrote: Joe, I too built up on an open usage platform and yes, when the subscribers logged into their PowerCode portals and viewed usage charts I got plenty of calls. We have not yet implemented metered billing because the pipe is still not capable of delivery, but soon. What I told the concerned callers was pretty much what I explained previously, that a small percentage of subscribers are utilizing the majority of the systems resources and that it was effecting everyone. I went on to explain how the goal was to charge those that use more services for their usage, and assure resources remain available for low volume users. I also add that based on FCC regulations I can not restrict any specific type of traffic, so this is the only fair way to assure everyone gets what they want. I tell them that our pricing model will not change cost to about 80% of our subscribers, and the other 20% will see increases based on actual usage. Many are fearful because they see the abusive rates charged by cellular carriers for small packages and immediately thing we are going to start hammering them for $150 per month. Like much of what I have read here, I too am looking at about 30-50 GB of transfer as a base with a small per GB cost. The real value to the upgrade for me will be once we demonstrate we can deliver a solid stream that people that are trying to pull multiple streams will have the option to doing so by upgrading to a higher bandwidth package. And that is the point I was making before, that the amount of transfer has little to do with the pipe size, but that size does impact the subscribers ability to have concurrent streams. So we are really focusing on three things; first, we are separating the basic and power subscribers, then we are offering those power subscribers the option to get whatever they want, providing they are paying for it. Sure a few will be pissed because they have this entitlement to unlimited service. Tell them you will start the day the power and gas company remove their meters. In the long run, the decisions made will provide maximum benefit to all subscribers. Perhaps we will see a few that refuse to pay and leave, but we will increase significantly as word gets out about our new capabilities. Remember, all those smart televisions need a pipe to connect to these streaming services. And that is the simplest answer, your changes in billing are to accommodate a market that did not exist when you deployed. When you and I put our systems in place Netflix was not streaming. So we absolutely must accommodate these new high demand users, while acknowledging the long time basic users. Just remember that many of them will move to the other side over the next few years and be very glad you were able to accommodate their new requirements. Joe From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the unlimited platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. Im looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Question, and maybe I have missed something in these posts. If we do usage based billing, do you still offer speed packages? Like insuring enough speed without buckets to run streaming applications? thanks heith From: Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 12:15 PM To: joe.mil...@dslbyair.com ; 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I too built up on an open usage platform and yes, when the subscribers logged into their PowerCode portals and viewed usage charts I got plenty of calls. We have not yet implemented metered billing because the pipe is still not capable of delivery, but soon. What I told the concerned callers was pretty much what I explained previously, that a small percentage of subscribers are utilizing the majority of the system’s resources and that it was effecting everyone. I went on to explain how the goal was to charge those that use more services for their usage, and assure resources remain available for low volume users. I also add that based on FCC regulations I can not restrict any specific type of traffic, so this is the only fair way to assure everyone gets what they want. I tell them that our pricing model will not change cost to about 80% of our subscribers, and the other 20% will see increases based on actual usage. Many are fearful because they see the abusive rates charged by cellular carriers for small packages and immediately thing we are going to start hammering them for $150 per month. Like much of what I have read here, I too am looking at about 30-50 GB of transfer as a base with a small per GB cost. The real value to the upgrade for me will be once we demonstrate we can deliver a solid stream that people that are trying to pull multiple streams will have the option to doing so by upgrading to a higher bandwidth package. And that is the point I was making before, that the amount of transfer has little to do with the pipe size, but that size does impact the subscriber’s ability to have concurrent streams. So we are really focusing on three things; first, we are separating the basic and power subscribers, then we are offering those power subscribers the option to get whatever they want, providing they are paying for it. Sure a few will be pissed because they have this entitlement to unlimited service. Tell them you will start the day the power and gas company remove their meters. In the long run, the decisions made will provide maximum benefit to all subscribers. Perhaps we will see a few that refuse to pay and leave, but we will increase significantly as word gets out about our new capabilities. Remember, all those smart televisions need a pipe to connect to these streaming services. And that is the simplest answer, your changes in billing are to accommodate a market that did not exist when you deployed. When you and I put our systems in place Netflix was not streaming. So we absolutely must accommodate these new high demand users, while acknowledging the long time basic users. Just remember that many of them will move to the other side over the next few years and be very glad you were able to accommodate their new requirements. Joe From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
to be just 8 that consumed 50%. And yes, bandwidth consumption has increased accordingly. This change from 8 to 13 subscribers being in the top 50% indicates my high usage subscribers have increased by 120% in roughly the past 6 months. Post holiday season I expect to see at least a 300% increase in my high usage subscribers, which without changes to my network, will bring data flow to a standstill. So build and meter. Dont ignore the elephant in the room referenced earlier in this discussion. Just look at copper phone lines that peaked at 186 million in 2004 which today number about 84 million. In just 9 years, pureplay VoIP, cable VoIP and cellular technologies caused a 55% shift in a once-thought untouchable market. Joe From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 5:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, whats a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max. Cellular does this. But there are two very different approaches taken even by cellcos when the cap is reached. If you are on VZ, ATT or Sprint, you are charged extra when you exceed the cap. A lot
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the unlimited platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. Im looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a pipe, so lets use a related analogy; You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load. With a family of 5 in each house, its easy to see that , despite the smaller service pipe, that house number 1 will have many times the water usage as house number 2. A smaller pipe did nothing to control the flow because the flow limit of the pipe was not reached. Those two pipes are exactly like a 3 meg and 5 meg Internet connection. Within reason, the size of the pipe will do little to limit heavy bandwidth usage. It only serves to spread it out, creating a longer period of time that it puts a demand on our networks. Like most, we saw our network performance begin to deteriorate as Netflix switched from a physical to a digital delivery system. The others since then have continued to slow our once speedy connections. Now we, as an industry, are faced with a continued rebuild to meet a voracious demand for bandwidth to deliver content that we never intended, or anticipated. Worse yet, we are being positioned to provide these improvements to support the business model of companies that barely acknowledge our existence. And they are getting smarter in their use of our pipes. There was a time when if you didnt have a good 4.5 meg flow, Netflix would not stream. They have gone to much more advanced encoding that will adjust to feeds of less than 2 megs, rendering a 3 meg rate limit useless in defending against them. The issue of Net Neutrality somehow became synonymous with no caps. It appears we are the only service that is viewed by consumers and governments that should be given away. Services like water, natural gas and electricity are each brought to a home and metered for actual usage, because it is the only fair way for those that use these services to pay their fair share. In most locals, the billing is specifically broken down into two parts. The first addresses the base cost of the connection to the property, and the second reflects the cost of the metered usage. How is Internet different? We are a service that delivers a commodity to be used and never recovered. The bits of data we move for our subscribers are no different than the kilowatt, gallon or therm moved by the others. Could you imagine if consumers demanded there be no metering on these services? We are being restricted by network limits from delivering the full pipe to subscribers. This limitation is a function of cost. Under our current structures we cannot
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Joe and Joe, good points and great writeup on this issue. We are still a soft CAP package company (generous CAP policy in writing for every plan, but only put abusers on automated controls). We market it as you have unlimited unless your system is detrimental to the network, in which the FAP policy is enforced with CAP. If we ever went UBB, I would look at competition, and continue to see how we could balance competitiveness with a change in policy. something like $5 per Gig that could be marketed as 1/2 of what Verizon charges, yet help solve the issue via income/cost measures. On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Joe Miller joe.mil...@dslbyair.comwrote: Joe, ** ** I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the “unlimited” platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. ** ** I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. ** ** I’m looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. ** ** I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. ** ** We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. ** ** Regards, ** ** Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 ** ** *From:* wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] *On Behalf Of *Joe Fiero *Sent:* Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM *To:* 'WISPA General List' *Subject:* Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions ** ** I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a “pipe”, so let’s use a related analogy;* *** ** ** You can have two homes with water service. One is an older home that has a ½ inch water main, the other is new construction and has a 1 inch service main. ** ** House number 1 has the original fixtures, so the toilet uses 6 gallons per flush, the shower flow is 7 gallons per minute and the clothes washer uses 40-55 gallons per load. ** ** House number two, being built under new codes that promote conservation has a low flow toilet that will use 1.6 – 2 gallons per flush, a low flow shower head that restricts flow to 2.5 gallons per minute and a new clothes washer that uses 20 gallons per load. ** ** With a family of 5 in each house, it’s easy to see that , despite the smaller service pipe, that house number 1 will have many times the water usage as house number 2. A smaller pipe did nothing to control the flow because the flow limit of the pipe was not reached. ** ** Those two pipes are exactly like a 3 meg and 5 meg Internet connection. Within reason, the size of the pipe will do little to limit heavy bandwidth usage. It only serves to spread it out, creating a longer period of time that it puts a demand on our networks. ** ** Like most, we saw our network performance begin to deteriorate as Netflix switched from a physical to a digital delivery system. The others since then have continued to slow our once speedy connections. Now we, as an industry, are faced with a continued rebuild to meet a voracious demand for bandwidth to deliver content that we never intended, or anticipated. Worse yet, we are being positioned to provide these improvements to support the business model of companies that barely acknowledge our existence. ** ** And they are getting smarter in their use of our pipes. There was a time when if you didn’t have a good 4.5 meg flow, Netflix would not stream. They have gone to much more advanced encoding that will adjust to feeds of less than 2 megs, rendering a 3 meg rate limit useless in defending against them. ** ** The issue of Net Neutrality somehow became synonymous with no caps. It appears we are the only service that is viewed by consumers
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Since you mentioned “all you can eat”… I have been asked twice to stop eating at all you can eat Chinese buffets…….. They did it with style. Rather than confront me, they suggested that it was time for me to try their dessert selections. From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of heith petersen Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 7:27 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Fred, thanks for the in-depth answer. Fortunately for me I have 5 different markets or areas I serve. Once we get a better handle on what people are doing on our network, I might start with my smallest market and look at usage based billing. I remember a WISPAlooza speaker asking why would anyone offer all you can eat service for a fixed price. Soon, hopefully, I will have the tools to implement these options. I have to do something, I don’t have much hair to pull anymore From: Fred Goldstein mailto:fgoldst...@ionary.com Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 4:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
In my youth, I was once asked. I don't recall it being that polite. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Joe Fiero joe1...@optonline.net To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:59:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Since you mentioned “all you can eat”… I have been asked twice to stop eating at all you can eat Chinese buffets…….. They did it with style. Rather than confront me, they suggested that it was time for me to try their dessert selections. From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of heith petersen Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 7:27 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Fred, thanks for the in-depth answer. Fortunately for me I have 5 different markets or areas I serve. Once we get a better handle on what people are doing on our network, I might start with my smallest market and look at usage based billing. I remember a WISPAlooza speaker asking why would anyone offer all you can eat service for a fixed price. Soon, hopefully, I will have the tools to implement these options. I have to do something, I don’t have much hair to pull anymore From: Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 4:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Joe, I too built up on an open usage platform and yes, when the subscribers logged into their PowerCode portals and viewed usage charts I got plenty of calls. We have not yet implemented metered billing because the pipe is still not capable of delivery, but soon. What I told the concerned callers was pretty much what I explained previously, that a small percentage of subscribers are utilizing the majority of the systems resources and that it was effecting everyone. I went on to explain how the goal was to charge those that use more services for their usage, and assure resources remain available for low volume users. I also add that based on FCC regulations I can not restrict any specific type of traffic, so this is the only fair way to assure everyone gets what they want. I tell them that our pricing model will not change cost to about 80% of our subscribers, and the other 20% will see increases based on actual usage. Many are fearful because they see the abusive rates charged by cellular carriers for small packages and immediately thing we are going to start hammering them for $150 per month. Like much of what I have read here, I too am looking at about 30-50 GB of transfer as a base with a small per GB cost. The real value to the upgrade for me will be once we demonstrate we can deliver a solid stream that people that are trying to pull multiple streams will have the option to doing so by upgrading to a higher bandwidth package. And that is the point I was making before, that the amount of transfer has little to do with the pipe size, but that size does impact the subscribers ability to have concurrent streams. So we are really focusing on three things; first, we are separating the basic and power subscribers, then we are offering those power subscribers the option to get whatever they want, providing they are paying for it. Sure a few will be pissed because they have this entitlement to unlimited service. Tell them you will start the day the power and gas company remove their meters. In the long run, the decisions made will provide maximum benefit to all subscribers. Perhaps we will see a few that refuse to pay and leave, but we will increase significantly as word gets out about our new capabilities. Remember, all those smart televisions need a pipe to connect to these streaming services. And that is the simplest answer, your changes in billing are to accommodate a market that did not exist when you deployed. When you and I put our systems in place Netflix was not streaming. So we absolutely must accommodate these new high demand users, while acknowledging the long time basic users. Just remember that many of them will move to the other side over the next few years and be very glad you were able to accommodate their new requirements. Joe From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Miller Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:18 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Joe, I do agree that usage based billing is the way to go. However, when our system was originally built 10 years ago, it was done so on the unlimited platform. The customers that we have I believe will respond in a negative way to the change. So how can we migrate a unlimited system to a UBB system without for a better word, piss off the existing customer base. I have thought about this for quite some time and the billing system I have in place can handle running both at the same time. What would be a good price point per gig of bandwidth? From looking at the current customer usage I think using $1.00 per gig would be a good starting point for discussion. Some customers will see a reduction in monthly cost while most will see an increase in their monthly service. I can see how we can re coup the cost of bandwidth a lot easier. I would like to come up with an email for my customers to ask them what they think in regards to having virtually as much bandwidth as they can use in exchange for billing for that usage. Basically, caped speed with flat rate vs uncapped speed with metered rate. Im looking at expanding into a new area and using the UBB platform will be a lot easier to start out with, but changing out the current customer base to UBB will be a bigger pill to swallow. I think that this is a good discussion for a session in Vegas. We have hundreds of companies that are members of WISPA, and I think with enough minds on this that we can come up with a good solution for everyone. Regards, Joe Miller www.dslbyair.com www.facebook.com/dslbyair 228-831-8881 From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Joe Fiero Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 9:17 AM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I believe Fred to be correct. Packages based on speed are not the answer. We call our connection a pipe, so
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Joe, in the small print, you have the optional service maintenance agreement. What does that entail for your customers? thanks heith mnw From: Joe Miller Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 12:16 PM To: 'WISPA General List' Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Here is what we did, see attached. From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of heith petersen Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 12:00 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] packaging suggestions I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around heith mnw ___ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless ___ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what's a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max. Cellular does this. But there are two very different approaches taken even by cellcos when the cap is reached. If you are on VZ, ATT or Sprint, you are charged extra when you exceed the cap. A lot extra. This leads people to buy bigger plans than they need, just to be sure they don't hit the cap. If on the other hand you're on T-Mobile, once you hit the cap your data is throttled WAY down to EDGE speeds (around 80 kbps if the wind is from the west), but they don't charge more. So my gut feeling is that the best strategy for dealing with pink-eyed elephants is to move to usage-based plans. Look at the actual monthly usage for each customer and see how many would fall into any given tier, if you draw tiers. Set it up so that few people pay more than now, but those who watch TV will. Something like 50 GB/month is probably a typical heavy web surfer who likes YouTube (which is not streaming) and has their share of Microsoft Updates to deal with, but only watches a little streaming. It's the 100+ GB users you want to ding. But you can create a low-cost plan (say, 10 GB) for those who
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
We moved to this model years ago. 50G per month, up to 10Mb/s burst,1am to 7am doesn't count against cap, drop to 256K/128K when you reach the cap, no contract Very few complaints. If they want streaming, we sell them a CIR at whatever speed they want. $200 for 2M, $350 for 4M and so on. Contract required. Very few takers. -- On 9/25/2013 5:55 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what's a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max. Cellular does this. But there are two very different approaches taken even by cellcos when the cap is reached. If you are on VZ, ATT or Sprint, you are charged extra when you exceed the cap. A lot extra. This leads people to buy bigger plans than they need, just to be sure they don't hit the cap. If on the other hand you're on T-Mobile, once you hit the cap your data is throttled WAY down to EDGE speeds (around 80 kbps if the wind is from the west), but they don't charge more. So my gut feeling is that the best strategy for dealing with pink-eyed elephants is to move to usage-based plans. Look at the actual monthly usage for each customer and see how many would fall into any given tier, if you draw tiers. Set it
Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions
Fred, thanks for the in-depth answer. Fortunately for me I have 5 different markets or areas I serve. Once we get a better handle on what people are doing on our network, I might start with my smallest market and look at usage based billing. I remember a WISPAlooza speaker asking why would anyone offer all you can eat service for a fixed price. Soon, hopefully, I will have the tools to implement these options. I have to do something, I don’t have much hair to pull anymore From: Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 4:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the network neutrality kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the neutral answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max. Cellular does this. But there are two very different approaches taken even by cellcos when the cap is reached. If you are on VZ, ATT or Sprint, you are charged extra when you exceed the cap. A lot extra. This leads people to buy bigger plans than they need, just to be sure they don't hit the cap. If on the other hand you're on T-Mobile, once you hit the cap your data is throttled WAY down to EDGE speeds (around 80 kbps if the wind is from the west), but they don't charge more. So my
