We spend about a day on admin of the program. Per month. So about $100. The problem out here is that we also have a ton of competition. And VERY rural markets. And LOT of spectrum competition. We can OFFER all of the higher grade services in the world, but we can't deliver them.... Plus people out here don't value internet that highly. We have some competition that does speed tiers, we're pulling customers from them almost as fast as we're pulling them from the sat. companies.
We just can't physically offer higher speeds to folks. I've really toyed with the idea of trying to combine the two ideas. Speed and usage limits per customer. Yet every time I see someone try to limit speeds teh bandwidth to support that customer actually goes up. Out here the PUD that we buy access from used to sell 100 meg pipes, even though we were billed for 10 megs (don't ask....). One month they actually turned on the throttling. Our upstream costs INCREASED by 10 or 20%. Even though we dropped our incoming speed by 90%. marlon ----- Original Message ----- From: Travis Johnson To: WISPA General List Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2009 11:39 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Metered Billing Marlon, With thousands of wireless users, I think our "unlimited eat all you want" is working quite well. And I can say we have 5 or 6 competitors (DSL, wireless, cable, licensed Wimax, etc.) so there is no monopoly. You are brining in $1k extra per month... but it would be interesting to see how much "extra" time is being spent on that system... including the billing, phone calls, tracking, analyzing, etc. You would be better off to just "upgrade" those higher usage customers to a more expensive monthly plan, and stop worrying about billing for overage. You would make more "profit" each month by doing so. Travis Microserv Marlon K. Schafer wrote: http://www.odessaoffice.com/services.html We've done this for years. Brandon Checkalets built the software that we use. We bill on usage. Lowish base price, but relatively high overage fees. We bill out about $1k per month in overages. Our average customer does about 4 gigs per month. We have lost a few customers due to this. But they are net negative customers so I don't mind. After all, there are two main goals in business. One, turn a profit, two, make sure your competition doesn't. Loosing someone that's pulling 20+ gigs per month certainly isn't helping my competition's services at all! We just compare the billing mechanism to things people are already paying as they go. Stuff like gas, food, electricity, cell phone minutes, clothes, water, tires, um, everything else in life! If they are really sharp I'll explain how the all you can eat all of the time only works if there is a monopoly with artificially high prices for everyone else. marlon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Rogers" <[email protected]> To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2009 4:56 AM Subject: [WISPA] Metered Billing We are on the verge of changing to a metered or tiered billing structure with Caps that once they exceed the cap; it doesn't shut off, but they get charged the overage. Netflix is getting out of control and I don't want to punish the customers that only use it occasionally. I think they are very innovative solutions and don't want to hinder new applications. I just want people that download 160 GB in a month, when the average is nearly 10 GB a month, to pay their share for expanding the network. Who has dabbled in the metered/tiered services and what were your customers responses? What are your tiers? Have attitudes changed toward your company as being greedy? We already have everything in place to do it, just need to send out the letter saying we are doing it and why. Eric Rogers Precision Data Solutions, LLC (317) 831-3000 x200 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
