Friday, August 28. 2009Is "Unlimited" Coming Back.........John Linton .........in to daily use in ISP land? I watched with interest when AAPT introduced unlimited 'off peak' plans in to their revived 'thrust' in to the residential market and their subsequent modifications/tweaks/clarifications. I also note a 'spokesperson's' statement that they were encouraged by the success of these plans and were seriously investigating expanding the use of that concept. I've also 'listened' to the 'murmers' around the various industry sources concerning the forays by TPG, iPrimus and Dodo into "huge" off peak allowances for various plans.....but as far as I can see (in the briefer and briefer time I have available) only AAPT has re-introduced the actual "unlimited" word in to actual usage. My memory is increasingly unreliable but I thought the last of the "all you can eat" unlimited adventurism died out a couple of years ago with the bankruptcies of the last mindless people who started up companies on the smell of an oily rag that tried to use such enticements. I don't remember their names but I seem to recall they started up - they made their wild offers - they went broke. It was a passing phase that lasted for around three years in the 'early' days of ADSL and just demonstrated that tiny companies can't possibly make 'inroads' into the Australian, or I suspect any other, communications marketplace........but... .........AAPT is a different kettle of begonias - it's a quasi-carrier with a parent that owns half of Southern Cross and a real need to either get in or get out of the Australian marketplace and has fiddle faddled around for the past few years while its parent dithers about whether to fund it or flick it. It did buy Powertel and, while I may be seen to be biased, that gave it a decent national network and a decent wholesale operation; as well as a 25% share in iinet that Powertel acquired when, together with Amcom (who also took 25%) they bailed iinet out of their last near bankruptcy experience. It also retains whats left of its billion dollar a year residential and corporate telephone and data customer base. Like Terry (at least as portrayed by Marlon Brando) AAPT "coulda been a contender" and maybe it, together with its parent, is going to try and revive previous dreams of Australian glory. Only AAPT or Optus is really in the position to offer some form of 'unlimited' ADSL2 in off peak times - and possibly TPG/iinet/Internode may have some lesser capability. As the screws tighten on an, apparently, slowing new ADSL take up and the need to hold current levels of customers there will come a time, perhaps that time will come quite soon, when one of those companies (and it very much looks like AAPT is the first) will do something along the unlimited lines if for no other reason than it can be done at no/little cost to them and they have run out of all other ideas....at the end of the day the Australian ADSL provider market is just one long, loud chorus of "MEEEE TOOOOO". The recent SX price cuts together with more sophisticated caching and a strengthening $A have reduced IP prices by almost 2/3 (or more for the larger buyers I would imagine) over the past few month to a point where the cost of cached/pure IP 'blend' delivered to a customer is something around $A50.00 per mbps for small companies like Exetel - compared with something around $A150 only fifteen or so months ago. This is fine for companies who own their own exchange back hauls (any company that has its own DSLAMs) as they also control the cost of that component of the gb delivery network - not so good for small companies like Exetel because we don't. So Optus, TPG and, I assume, iinet can exploit their empty off peak exchange back hauls and their unused off peak IP capacity to play the "Unlimited" card, at least on the exchanges where they have back hauls. From what AAPT has said and done that appears to be the case already and there is no reason why the other companies can't do it though who knows how many exchanges/percentage of the market they really have where the back hauls are sufficient to do this? There are no technical or financial reasons why several/many companies couldn't offer 'unlimited' ADSL2 download plans for some definition of off peak because it would cost practically nothing and it would not affect the overall network performance. However the actual question of whether it would actually benefit any provider by doing this? For as long as there has been an ADSL business in Australia the short answer is "no, there would be no benefit to the provider whatsoever". (re-check history of broadband in Australia for incidents where any carrier benefited from 'unlimited plans' - find none). But.....and it is now a real "but", an awful lot has changed since the collapse of every provider who tried 'unlimited' as a way of obtaining customers in the 'past'. But, then again....nothing has changed in terms of what provider in their right mind wants the sort of customer who wants to download 300 gb a month for "free"?...let alone a few thousand of them! And I think that's the crucial decision. Exetel has always been very generous with its downloads per dollar - as far as I can see we have remained the best value in the Australia market since our 'day one' - so we have never been averse to catering for the 'heavier' broadband user. However we have absolutely no desire to cater to the sort of customer who would think that 'unlimited' was something they would really need....at least not as a way of attracting new customers....... There is at least one other way (and I'm sure there are many more than one) of using 'unlimited' "off peak" plans (perhaps unlimited plans?) to benefit an ISP business but I, personally, don't think it's the way AAPT have begun to use them. For instance, I was thinking that we could 'reward' our long term customers by putting them on an unlimited plan as an extension of the pioneer bonus scheme. Trackbacks
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John,
Perhaps if you were able to offer an ADSL2 service at your normal plans and then offer an unlimited pipe (another PPPoE session) at another rate on the same service. 512k ~ $50, 1500k ~$150. I would be keen for this service. Steve Comment (1)
You could have a qualifier, that everyone is required to agree to, which would give you the "right" to end an unlimited service if you see an unreasonable amount of GB's being downloaded. You would need to stipulate what you consider is reasonable.
Perhaps some sort of incentive/cost reduction for those that don't feel "it's their right" to download every last GB they can get away with. Although for me, 54 or 60GB off peak is effectively unlimited, as I could never imagine what I could download to get even close to using that sort of quota. Comments (2)
if you place 'reasonable' limits, then it ceases to be unlimited, and starts to be the kind of misuse of the word that is so often abused in the ISP world.
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KarLos, You are right. But for an unlimited offering to be viable to an ISP, the few users that try to download unreasonable amounts of data will spoil it for the rest.
So I guess an unlimited offering will remain a fairytale. With the generous limits already offered by Exetel, perhaps persuing an umlimited option is pointless? Comments (2)
John,
are ISPs allowed to purchase tv shows that are not shown in AU and offer them to their customers. The nine network has taken the position of a tv drug dealer by hooking many watchers on a show that they have shown for years and then choose not to show the series to its end - even though it continues on for years after nine stops the broadcasts being shown in AU. The show in question in my case is SURVIVOR - which is now in series 19. Im happy to pay for the show but the nine network decided to hide it in the 11- 12pm timeslot and then gave up completely after running only a few episodes of series 17 . I want to watch the full series but dont want to download that which is illegal. Im sure many other find themselves in a similar position -- why do i have to become a criminal when a tv network chooses not to play these shows in Australia. I dont want to be thought of as a criminal but if the networks choose not to play certain series in AU - what are the nazi copyright enforcers actually protecting in AU. cheers Comment (1)
I think most Exetel plans have effectively unlimited Off Peak anyway. How many people need more the 60GB? Sure there are some but they are small in number and can be ignored ... for now.
What might bite you is high bandwidth usage such as ABC iView (and others). There is a definite demand for that. There must be a way to make that unmetered. It's all legal and everything!! Comment (1)
We will offer 'free' ABC once it is available from a non-Internode source.
Comment (1)
Offering unmeter access to a number of steaming survives could be a great selling point.
Streaming unlike downoads is a lot harder to abuse. Comment (1)
bill, i believe survivor is now being shown on "go" (nine's new digital channel). yep, just checked on yahoo, tue 8.30 for survivor gabon - but i'm not sure if this is the latest series (i don't watch it).
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AAPT's parent Telecom NZ has been playing around with offering an unlimited plan in NZ on and off for the last few years. Initially it was a disater they didn't have the caching and management planned correctly. Performance was terrible and they had to stop offering it after they got in trouble with the Commerce Commission for misleading advertising (marketing department got carried away as they do).
They recently started offering their unlimited plan again this year, this time with better caching of google/youtube and stronger shaping of p2p/filesharing during 9am-2am. It seems successful so far, so they are probably looking at repeating the experience by using the same system in AU via AAPT. My experience so far is that downloads of anything larger than a certain size max out at 100-180KB/s from 9am-2am. It seems many people (including me) are willing to sacrifice raw speed for higher caps as long as the latency for general web use. I personally feel that once you're past about 180KB/s having good latency is a more important factor for customer satisfaction than raw download speed. I notice when there's a 500ms delay doing something but when I start a download for an application I want to install half the time I don't even look at the speed it's going at. Comment (1)
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