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 justify the cost of building a large pipe to each subscriber. After all, we are an industry built on contention. This sharing of bandwidth was the impetus of the WISP business for many years, but that concept has outlived its usefulness. Our subscribers no longer want to surf the web or check email. Most now do that on their smart phones. No, our pipe has become an unwilling player on the next pervasive shift in the paradigm, as subscription video shifts to a digital delivery medium. Just as VoIP has been disruptive to POTS, and satellite was to cable, we are on the cusp of the next trend in consumer electronics. Televisions today are being built with Ethernet ports and wireless networking. They are coming with built in apps for all the streaming services. And they want all this to work over OUR pipes. So we need to face reality and understand that if we dont provide these services, we have become useless to our subscribers. Our failure to respond to this trend will throw the doors open for someone to come in to our markets and pluck each of our hard earned subscribers until we are decimated and a faint memory. If you think subscribers are satisfied with basic Internet services today, you are in denial. The answer is we need to build out robust networks that can deliver copious amounts of bandwidth to our subscribers. Our repayment will come by employing the time proven practice of metering for usage. We can divide our subscribers into two groups. The cutting edge-tech savvy type that is creating our issues, and the rest who will be joining them. I am sure that most of us have similar network statistics. If I look at one of my network segments I have the top 4 users consuming 25% of all bandwidth. I hit 50% at the 13th subscriber. This is a change in trend. It used 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 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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