In my youth, I was once asked. I don't recall it being that polite.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Fiero" <joe1...@optonline.net> To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:59:24 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Since you mentioned “all you can eat”… I have been asked twice to stop eating at all you can eat Chinese buffets…….. They did it with style. Rather than confront me, they suggested that it was time for me to try their dessert selections. From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of heith petersen Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 7:27 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions Fred, thanks for the in-depth answer. Fortunately for me I have 5 different markets or areas I serve. Once we get a better handle on what people are doing on our network, I might start with my smallest market and look at usage based billing. I remember a WISPAlooza speaker asking why would anyone offer all you can eat service for a fixed price. Soon, hopefully, I will have the tools to implement these options. I have to do something, I don’t have much hair to pull anymore From: Fred Goldstein Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 4:55 PM To: wireless@wispa.org Subject: Re: [WISPA] packaging suggestions On 9/25/2013 1:00 PM, heith petersen wrote: I just got off the phone with a customer. I made some adjustments to his SM the other day to make netflix work. He called back today to tell me it works good but his direct tv showtime package is OK but not great. I kind of wanted to ask him what the hell gives dish net the right to sell you a service that rides on my back bone where I do not make anymore money for your additional use of my service. Anyways I got that off my chest. So our situation has been for years residential customers pay a flat rate, we have no speed or usage based packages. When the customer calls about netflix I make throttle adjustments in the SM to make them happy. Well eventually I have an overloaded AP, then I have to either sectorize or add a different frequency, add higher capacity BHs out of my pocket, just to keep my customers happy at the same price we have been charging for 10 years. (We recently, since going to new billing service, added a $2 paper fee for non emailed invoices and I get crucified by the same customers every month). Ideally I want to get away from mechanical throttles. We are in the middle running our authentication thru our new billing system, and converting bridged to fully routed. You know, the things we should have been doing from day one. Anyways, once we get things squared away, what’s a common practice on doing packages? If you have basic customers out there that do not stream or use tons of bandwidth would you keep them at the current rate, or drop the rate and throttle them tight? I would assume that we would want to offer an increased package to known streamers, maybe throttle them down to a basic level and wait to hear from them when they are willing to upgrade their package? I would then anticipate that making the expenditures to provide them with the service would be worth the venture. Anyways just looking for some suggestions. There is always time to do it right the second time around http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless This is a really big problem for WISPs. Streaming high-quality video has been the potential elephant in the room of the ISP business for a long time. It is finally starting to show up in the room, thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and others like them. Poisoning the well is the public's paranoia about cable companies, who usually have ample Internet capacity (fiber to a major peering point; high capacity HFC networks). So if they do anything to limit streaming, it's seen as an anti-competitive trick, to get people to buy more channels. This may or may not be true, but that's the public perception, which was a major driver of the "network neutrality" kerfuffle now in court. Of course most WISPs are nothing like cable! But the public doesn't see the difference, and if the FCC gains authority over WISPs (which they shouldn't have, by law, but what's the law when the public wants their circuses, I mean teevee?), then if WISPs do anything that selectively blocks video, or even UDP, it might be seen as a violation. So your legal authority to act is in question. And who is leading the appeal against the law? Verizon, who is actually behind it (since it hurts Comcast more than them). Hence their arguments are on the lame side. The only things going for us in the DC Circuit are that the DC Circuit dislikes the FCC in general, and the FCC did a really bad job in claiming the authority. Thus the "neutral" answer is to move towards bandwidth caps. This to me makes more sense, to a WISP, than a rate-based price tier. Somebody can burst at 10 Mbps once in a while and put little load on the network, but somebody watching TV at 3 Mbps all day will clobber you. Gigabytes/month represents a monthly average load. If you do this, you can raise everyone's base rate to the max. Cellular does this. But there are two very different approaches taken even by cellcos when the cap is reached. If you are on VZ, ATT or Sprint, you are charged extra when you exceed the cap. A lot extra. This leads people to buy bigger plans than they need, just to be sure they don't hit the cap. If on the other hand you're on T-Mobile, once you hit the cap your data is throttled WAY down to EDGE speeds (around 80 kbps if the wind is from the west), but they don't charge more. So my gut feeling is that the best strategy for dealing with pink-eyed elephants is to move to usage-based plans. Look at the actual monthly usage for each customer and see how many would fall into any given tier, if you draw tiers. Set it up so that few people pay more than now, but those who watch TV will. Something like 50 GB/month is probably a typical heavy web surfer who likes YouTube (which is not streaming) and has their share of Microsoft Updates to deal with, but only watches a little streaming. It's the 100+ GB users you want to ding. But you can create a low-cost plan (say, <10 GB) for those who mainly need just email and web. It still beats mobile. Throttling T-Mobile style (say, down to 512/256k, not 80/24k) seems more friendly to me than hitting someone with a big bill. That would be "neutral" but block TV. And you could even let people "bank" last month's unused quota (AT&T does this with minutes, right?) for those special occasions (like the Breaking Bad finale), if your software can handle it. But a bill-based system is easier to implement... at least if you don't count post-bill customer calls. I wish there were an easy answer but this is going to be a big issue so it's good that you're bringing it up for discussion. -- Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701 _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
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