We use Powercode to shape bandwidth and to track bandwidth usage, and when the customer goes over the limit, they are throttled down very hard, like 64k. Powercode has a Customer Portal feature that lets them login and check their usage any time they want. Also, they can set up daily emails from their Portal so that they can get an email each day about their monthly usage. We have about 20 customers that do this.
Took us a while to get the Powercode system to work, and it's still not 100%, but I would say that putting in these usage thresholds and tracking has helped us identify who our heavy users are and to deal with them appropriately. Doing this has generated about $500/mo in additional revenue as customers move up to higher speed packages with higher monthly limits. Business clients, at this time, are handled differently. We don't currently have bandwidth limits on them. May in the future. Generally, though... abusers are home users. Keep in mind that our niche is rural, not competing "in town" very much. We have higher bandwidth packages with higher usage thresholds. I asked for a refresher about how we determined what our thresholds should be from our network engineer this morning. This is his response. In looking at it, figure that we are actually paying $45 per megabit, not $200. The $200 per megabit figure comes in with the cost of doing business (personnel, backhauls, maintenance, etc, and is an estimate of actual cost on what it takes to DELIVER bandwidth to a customer, not just PAY for bandwidth ourselves). Justin's response: ************** If you remember, the way I did it was this. I asked you to come up with a raw figure, in dollars/month, that our bandwidth costs us - i.e. the price point at which you could sell bandwidth wholesale and guarantee that we would still make a profit, even if it was fully saturated 24 hours a day (excluding factors such as backhaul saturation). You gave me a figure of about $200 per megabit. I fully doubled that to $400 per megabit, and started from there. I took the amount of maximum theoretical bandwidth a 1.5Mb customer could consume in a given month, if they were somehow able to use it for 24 hours straight. I did the same for our base rate of 1Mbp/s @ $400. I then compared the "difference" in value, and chose a MB figure that was at about 50% of what our actual "cost" would be as the maximum amount of bandwidth allowed. Example. A "$400/m" 1Mbps customer "resold" could theoretically consume 10.8GB/day or about 330GB/month A $49/m 1.5Mbps customer could theoretically consume 16.2GB/day or 494GB/month I then determined what the equivalent maximum amount of bandwidth we would be reselling a normal customer to if they were paying only $49 per month, which is a lot easier - you just take our profit figure of $400/m and divide it by $49 to get roughly 4, so 1/4th of 1.5Mbps which is just about 384kbps. Then I determined what is the maximum amount of bandwidth a 384kbps customer could consume. You get about 1.44Gb per day, or about 44GB/month. I knocked off a further 10% to give us a nice round ceiling, producing a final figure of 40GB/month for a 1.5Mbps customer as the maximum bandwidth they could be allowed to consume before they started hitting the falling point of the curve for bandwidth cost. Because I initially doubled our $200 cost to say that bandwidth, per megabit, costs us $400/m, we're comfortably padded. ************** ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Gerstenberger" <pa...@hrec.coop> To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 8:06 AM Subject: [WISPA] Overage thresholds and penalties > We have about 15% of our existing subscribers running PPPoE through > Mikrotik now, using the User Manager package. I'm astounded by the usage > I'm seeing from some accounts. We do cite "acceptable use" in our terms of > service, but we've rarely enforced it. I'm curious what approach other > WISPs take: how you determine your own acceptable use thresholds and what > penalties or deterrents are used. > > -Paul > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > 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: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
