John Linton ...or is that wording just 'spin' for not thinking through the problem carefully enough?
The new ability we put in place to allow a user to select the timing of their peak/off peak period has been implemented with no 'hitches' and has been utilised by a growing number of customers - that has been a very positive reaction to the ability to choose. Exetel has been a 'leader' in providing significant 'free down loads' to our customers since we introduced an initial 'free download period' in March 2004. I see, some 5 years later that AAPT has come up with that "new" idea:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/25133/127/
though their restriction of 2 am to 8 am is far less generous than Exetel's original offer (unlimited from midnight to 8 am) and nothing like as beneficial as Exetel's current offer of 60 gb usable from 12 midnight to 12 noon. Of course, various other ISPs have various 'off peak' offers that are generally pretty useless.
The basis for offering 'free off peak' downloads is blindingly obvious - at least historically. For as long as I have been associated with the supply of internet services to residential customers the period of peak usage has been between 7.30 pm and 11.30 pm with the zenith being some around 9.30 pm. So almost every ISPs usage graph showed a bell curve with the apex pf the bell being around 9.30 pm. Financial controllers (or in my first exposure to this issue - the CEO) looked at all the white space surrounding the 9.30 pm point on the MRTG report and was appalled at the waste of money that report conveyed to them - that all of that money spent at other times to cope with the peak time was wasted and you MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!!
There was, of course nothing you can do about it in 1995 except to stop buying more bandwidth and therefore watching the top of the bell curve progressively 'flatten' giving the illusion that less money was being wasted and that was true as long as you ignored the choruses (chori?) of complaint from the users whose packets were being dropped to create the illusion that more users were being provided services at the same bandwidth.
And so the first glimmer of the term 'off peak' began to appear some time in the late 1990s where the more imaginative and eninerring competent (and billing competent) ISPs began to tell their customers to use the time between midnight and 8 am to download and they would be charged less......and 'charged less' eventually became charged nothing. Bear in mind this was a dial up world and file downloads were then becoming more 'popular' and, in their way, were becoming as big an issue as P2P in today's broadband world.
However the concept of using the "dead" band width was well and truly learned by the dawn of the current century and the advent of broadband made it an even more important methodology of dealing with file downloading and then P2P made it essential - for a large percentage of ISPs. Obviously the founders of Exetel were well aware of this scenario and were well aware that if we wanted to offer the lowest download per dollar we would need to find a way/ways of utilising our 'dead' bandwidth which while the price of IP had fallen a great deal by early 2004 was still a significant cost. Even today it is a quite significant cost because of the very significant growth in average monthly downloads per user.
So for over 5 years we have done everything possible to encourage our users to use 'off peak' times for their file downloads and I have to say that over that time we have succeeded so well that we have indeed dramatically reduced the peak usage in the 7.30 pm to 11.30 pm period to the point where it is no longer the busiest time of day for usage of our bandwidth. A great result.....pity that 12 midnight to 12.20 am is now the peak usage period and it is actually higher than the old peak usage period used to be! We didn't actually solve the problem we just moved it to a different time.
We are considering modifying the off peak download allowance to reflect the cost to Exetel of the 'unused' bandwidth in the early hours of the morning versus the 12 midnight to 12.30 am period which is now the highest period of usage of the network - far exceeding the 'old' peak usage period of 7.30 pm to 10.30 pm that has held true for as long as I've been associated with internet service provision.
There are no 'firm' plans to make further changes but one possible change would be:
12 midnight to 12 noon - 18 gb
1 am to 1 pm - 36 gb
2 am to 2 pm - 72 gb
or some other arrangement and we will be discussing this with our customers (or at least those that are interested over the next week or so here:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=32147
IP bandwidth is about to become some 35% 'cheaper' and the caching we provide together with P2P controls change the cost equation very significantly....and it certainlky has to. By the end of June we will be providing in excess of 4 gbps of IP connectivity to our users at peak times compared with a little over 2 gbps some 15 months ago - a growth of almost 100%. Our broadband user base has only grown around 35% in that time and even the very significant cost savings delivered by caching and lower cost IP haven't kept pace with end user demand.
It appears to me, sometimes, that there is no solution to this issue and all we've managed to do since 1995 is to move the 'white areas' to a different position on the MRTG report.