Marlon:
The first part is pretty easy, we will just assume a 30 month
day:
Bytes = 1,000,000 bps * 60 seconds/min * 60 min/hour * 24 hours/day * 30
days / 8 bits/byte
= 324,000,000,000
The next part to covert to gigabytes is where people will have disputes.
I use 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes, but you can see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for the entire discussion.
Therefore in a month of continuous transfer they would move about 301.7
GB!
We also charge residential customers for transfer and have the
limit set at 4GB which is more than enough for 95%+ of our customers.
The other 5% simply get slowed down to dialup rates when they cross the
limit by our bandwidth monitor. If they want to pump the speed back up
they need to pay for additional transfer which we sell in 4GB blocks at
about the same as the monthly cost for the service. This definitely
cuts down on the abusers of the system which are of course the hardest
on the network.
For business customers we just price service accordingly and do
not place transfer limits on these accounts. That is just my 2 cents
worth, hope it helps.
Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Marlon K. Schafer (509) 982-2181
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 11:21 AM
To: wireless@wispa.org
Cc: isp-wireless@isp-wireless.com
Subject: [WISPA] Overage plan help
Hi All,
As most of you know, we bill for bits not speed. All of our customers
go as
fast as we can make them go. They do have to be responsible users
though.
To this end we had a 1 gig per month transfer limit. When I say gig, I
mean
it in the sense of what 1mbps service would be. So I guess that's byte
not
bit. Though I must admit, I get mixed up on the translation from bits
per
second to bits transferred.
Anyhow, using the data we got from that great new usage tracking
software
that Brandon wrote for us, it's clear that 1 gig won't cut it. (The
original 1 gig is the result of figuring out that our average dial-up
user
in 1999 used 110 meg per month.) Today, I've raised the included
service
level to 4 gigs.
The 5th gig is an extra $5. The next one is $10, then $20, then $40
etc.
etc. etc. By the time you hit 25 gigs of data transfer, you're into me
for
over $5,000,000. Naturally, no one will pay that and they aren't really
expected to.
However, our billing rate is designed for folks that are spending $35 to
$40
per month and doing less than 4 gigs per month. If someone is using a
lot
of data there are two main issues that I have to recover costs for. One
is
that I pay for internet access based on usage. So the more the
customers
use the more I have to pay, and it's up by 15% last month! Next, there
is
only so much capacity on each tower, if we have heavy users in a
particular
zone we have to add capacity for them.
In the end, what I'm trying to do is either bill or run off the 5% of
the
customer base that are costing us money instead of generating a profit.
Customers like this one
http://radius.odessaoffice.com/iptrack/search.php?ip=64.146.146.112&mont
h=12&year=2006&period=month
they do more than 4 gigs almost every day.
I'm looking for two things. One is, if someone had a constant 1 mbps of
data transfer rate, how many gigs would they use per month. (we pay for
internet based on the mbps rates we consume)
Next, what's a more reasonable overage table? Our minimum bill for
anything
at all here is $5.00 just to cover the costs of writing the bill.
I want to keep billing per bit. It's, by far, the most effective way to
compete against cable and dsl. It's also a good way to push the hogs
over
to competing services. Our average user is running at about 1.7 gigs
per
month. This includes all of my servers and the mail server alone hit 50
gigs last month. So I'll bet that the average user is actually under
1.5
gigs per month.
Thoughts and ideas????
Marlon
(509) 982-2181 Equipment sales
(408) 907-6910 (Vonage) Consulting services
42846865 (icq) And I run my own wisp!
64.146.146.12 (net meeting)
www.odessaoffice.com/wireless
www.odessaoffice.com/marlon/cam
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