Re: [AFMUG] UBB - Usage Based Billing WAS: tired of entitled streamers Very interesting case study. I'm curious to see how this works moving forward. I can see similar things happening here. Usually the customer isn't even aware. But I could also see a lot of pushback if you start sending them warning emails. I think finding a way to do this that is seamless and doesn't cause them to think your network sucks could be golden. Keep thinking all you smart guys ;)
----- Original Message ----- From: Mark - Myakka Technologies To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] UBB - Usage Based Billing WAS: tired of entitled streamers A real life example of why UBB or Usage Tracking is a good idea. Had a customer call in yesterday, she got an email stating she was getting close to her limit. We pulled up her account. In September she used 60GB. In October she use 200GB. So far for November she is at 3500GB. Looked at her real time stats and she had her system pegged at 50Mbps. Earlier in the month she was pegged at 75Mbps. From our usage data we can tell this started at 10am on 11/10. Of course the customer has no idea what it is. I'm convinced that it is some type of streaming or rouge satellite box. Yesterday I bounced her Ethernet port and the data stopped. However, it fired back up at 3:30am this morning. Bouncing her port killed it again, we'll see what happens tomorrow morning. If we didn't have some type of usage tracking in place, this would have just continued to run. Get a couple of dozen of these running at a time and it could be an issue. -- Best regards, Mark mailto:[email protected] Myakka Technologies, Inc. www.Myakka.com ------ Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 12:06:57 AM, you wrote: Darin and Steve, I completely agree that off-peak usage should be free and peak usage should pay more. I keep looking at my bandwidth graphs and see all this time from midnight-noon-6pm that my fiber is basically sitting under-utilized yet i am paying for full utilization 24/7/365. Not to mention backhaul capacity throughout my entire network thats under-utilized those times. We are fastly moving towards internet supplying all of a households TV watching needs and we need to adjust pricing models accordingly to accommodate that especially for capacity during the 6pm-midnight time frame. On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 11:30 PM Steve Jones <[email protected]> wrote: I forwarded your plotting to the boss, I really think there is something to it. We (industry) always look at "off peak" as overnight, rather than literal off peak, because of the morning peak. but I really think youre onto something golden On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 10:03 PM Darin Steffl <[email protected]> wrote: Steve, We haven't implemented it yet but we're going to in January. We will only slow down after reaching X amount of data per plan tier. We'll never charge extra though as people hate unpredictable bills. They can choose to upgrade to a plan with more high speed data during peak or learn to use less data by adjusting quality settings, not leaving video on as background noise, etc. Our primary goal for this is to reduce peak time congestion and make the heaviest users pay more to fund the upgrades we're having to make earlier than forecasted. Our customers expect good speedtests all hours of the day and right now we're being hammered by abusive users so we need to take action. I won't eat into our profit to upgrade gear we just deployed 1-2 years ago due to bad users consuming 5-10x more than our average users. If they want to stay, they have to pay up so I can afford to keep upgrading. On Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 9:38 PM Steve Jones <[email protected]> wrote: Darin, this is a pretty fresh concept. Never looked at it from this perspective. I assume you would have a base X rate. with Free for all time outside the peak use times (I assume you would advertise this time frame, and have a contractual way of adjusting it) Average the use during peak time? and allow that average as a base, with anything beyond that as a UBB? I think youre on to something sexy here. Have you implemented this? On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 7:40 PM Darin Steffl <[email protected]> wrote: Kurt, I touched in this in the other email thread but we are moving towards having high speed data thresholds that only count data from noon to midnight. It's targeting exactly the heavy use periods. We may tweak it to only count from 6pm to 11pm but the data amounts would have to be lower then. We would calculate what an average HD stream uses per hour, then tailor plans to support that amount of usage for that time period. I would recommend never having overage charges though. Once a customer hits the threshold, they will slow down and get an email from us. I'm a big believer in having predictable bills. If the customer uses too much data and slows down, they have the choice to pay more or stay slow until the next bill cycle. On Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 6:28 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: The mobile guys also limit video resolution, I don’t know how they do it from a technical perspective, but for example AT&T has 3 “unlimited” plans – Starter, Extra and Elite. They say Starter and Elite limit streaming to standard def, and only Elite can stream in high def. It also seems streaming services will use whatever bandwidth is available to increase video quality. The customer may not notice the difference. Which means they may also not notice if you throttle their video speed. Like there was an article complaining that 4K quality games with Google Stadia doesn’t look as good as 4K on a console. I hope Stadia falls on its face, but honestly, I look at the images in the article that are supposed to show the big difference in quality, and I can barely see it. Maybe because I’m not a gamer I don’t appreciate the difference. Is it coincidence that the image in question is of Lara Croft’s butt? Is that what this is all about? https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-review-gaming-streaming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Mark - Myakka Technologies Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 5:34 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] UBB - Usage Based Billing WAS: tired of entitled streamers Kurt, We used to do UBB on our wireless system. Most people were fine with it. Had a few grumpy people as always. Didn't scale well, got out of hand rapidly as customer base grew. Currently on our fiber system we do the "unlimited" the cell guys invented. You have unlimited Internet with no extra charges. Once you go over a threshold we will throttle the speeds back. We throttle the user down one package. If they are on the 50 Mbps package they get throttle down to the 25 Mbps package. Still very usable for most people. Someone on the 100 Mbps package would drop to 75 Mbps. Most people won't even notice that. We have always kept a perceived value on bytes for our customers. I'm also a firm believer in tracking bandwidth to the user even if you don't do UBB. Our customers have 3 months worth of usage they can drill down to the hour.. We are using radius accounting, so data is almost live. -- Best regards, Mark mailto:[email protected] Myakka Technologies, Inc. www.Myakka.com ------ Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 5:55:45 PM, you wrote: Is anyone else doing Usage Based Billing? Or Peak UBB? We have noticed in the last 6 months huge exponential increases of streaming adoption especially between 6pm-midnight. Its almost getting unmanageable and we are even using a Procera device. Problem is >50% of all traffic after 6pm is streaming and it doesn't matter we would pretty much have to block all other non-streaming traffic between those hours just to make room for the streaming demand. So we in essence have to design the network to perform during a peak window between 7pm-midnight and it just doesn't make financial sense for the network to be sitting there not being used 19 hours of the day. 100% of all new signups are asking us if we are "Unlimited" which has been a huge selling point for us. Has anyone made the jump to UBB and what was the reaction? My initial thoughts are first 500GB free and after that $10 for each block of 100GB past the first 500GB. Other factors are do we give free data between midnight-6pm so not penalizing people that are not using during peak hours? Really, Really curious to hear if anyone has made the jump and what customer reaction has been. Something has got to happen.... -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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