Hi All,
OK, so now that we know who our heavy users are I have to come up with a
couple of things.
First, I have to figure out how many kbps a gig of download would be.
Specifically, I've got a couple of customers doing 50 gigs per month. How
many kbps does it take to generate that?
We pay for our internet based on kbps.
Next, what do we do for an overage fee? Currently it's set as $5 for the
first gig, $10 for the second, $20 for the third etc. At 25 gigs the
customer has a $5,000,000 bill. Sure that'll run off the abusers, but I'd
rather find a more reasonable way to bill them.
We have a business customer that legitimately uses 40 to 50 gig per month.
We just moved them from $75 to $350 per month (matched the t-1 price they
pay in another town). They don't feel abused and I feel more comfortable
about their usage. We bumped them up to 60 gigs included.
I have another customer that's at 10 gigs now (our included limit is 4). We
talked about an appropriate rate of increase. Under our standard levels,
they'd more than double their bill. If we hit them with a couple of hundred
in billing they'd go elsewhere. We would, however, like to dig a little bit
deeper into their back pocket. I talked with them a bit about our need to
recover costs based on their usage etc.
They said if we hit $100 to $125 they'd not have a problem with that.
On our end we have two problems. One, we pay for internet based on usage.
The more they use the more we pay. Our costs were up 15% last month. The
other, maybe worse issue, is that we have to increase the capacity to towers
that have heavy users on them. Possibly to the point of a dedicated ap to
cover just a customer or three. Now we're really talking bucks and spectrum
issues etc.
My original idea was that if a person went over by a gig or two we'd ding
them a few dollars as a "shot across the bow" kind of thing. Around 50 of
our 400 users are going over the new 4 gig level though. Some will fix that
by getting postini and dropping the spam. Some will fix that by getting the
kids to turn off the file sharing programs. And some are legitimately using
that much data.
In the end, we don't want to run off people if we can help it. Those at the
30 to 50 gig level will probably leave us for other services, but that's
gonna be ok. They mess things up for everyone around them. Better that my
competitors have customers like that than we do. For all of the rest, we
need to recover our costs, and hopefully make a little extra money on them.
Soooo, my new idea is, gigs 5 through 10 would be at $5 per month. Gigs 10
through 20 at $10 per gig. Over 20, call for a price and we'll work
something out that works for all of us. We really need it to naturally hit
around $350 at the 50 gig level to match what we did with the first big
customer.
Thougths????
Marlon
(509) 982-2181 Equipment sales
(408) 907-6910 (Vonage) Consulting services
42846865 (icq) And I run my own wisp!
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.odessaoffice.com/wireless
www.odessaoffice.com/marlon/cam
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