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 mainly need just
email and web. It still beats mobile.
Throttling T-Mobile style (say, down to 512/256k, not 80/24k) seems more
friendly to me than hitting someone with a big bill. That would be
"neutral" but block TV. And you could even let people "bank" last
month's unused quota (AT&T does this with minutes, right?) for those
special occasions (like the Breaking Bad finale), if your software can
handle it. But a bill-based system is easier to implement... at least
if you don't count post-bill customer calls.
I wish there were an easy answer but this is going to be a big issue so
it's good that you're bringing it up for discussion.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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