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 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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--
West Michigan Wireless ISP
Allegan, Michigan 49010
269-686-8648
A Division of:
Camp Communication Services, INC
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