Hey guys, We are a WISP just under 4 years old and I feel as we've grown that we attract very heavy users and the "light" users we desire stay with our competition because they are happy with slow speeds and frequent issues and they know no different. We offer such a great network that the power users want to switch to us.
For example, for every subscriber we have, we average 1 Mbps of usage per customer at peak. Most other ISP's I've talked with are about 0.3 Mbps per customer average. To find this number, simply take your peak bandwidth usage at night and divide by your customer count. Let me know what your number is. Looking at that number, our usage is 3X higher than the average ISP that we've talked to WISP's and ILEC's. What on earth can we do to attract more of the lower usage customers to help balance out our traffic and get our average usage under 1 Mbps per customer? We're going to need to offer some sort of promo to get these people over to us so they can help increase our revenue so we can fund upgrades to keep up with demand. We sell 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 Mbps plans and we have 90% of our customers on our 10 Mbps or higher plan. I need to do a much better job of selling either a lower plan or a higher plan to someone who doesn't use it as much to help with our average. I continue to be a little jealous of the ISP's here that have 2,000 subs and only are using 500-600 Mbps of bandwidth. If we had 2,000 subs today with our current customer average usage, our usage at night would be 2 Gbps!!! We simply aren't bringing in enough revenue to maintain our margins and upgrade links fast enough to provide what we are selling. We are seeing congestion now and we shouldn't be anywhere close to this much usage. Damn Netflix and video game downloads :) Any advice and numbers for your ISP would be great. I don't need sub count or anything, just the average peak usage per customer. Thanks -- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com 507-634-WiFi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi> Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
