Saturday, September 12. 2009If You Start With A Blank Sheet Of Paper.....John Linton ......and no 'old' views of what happened in the past then it becomes quite interesting to try and work out how you should provide ADSL services in Australia. The first thing you get to re-acquaint yourself with is that if you're Exetel there is sfa you can do about offering attractive ADSL1 plans because at Exetel's buying levels the costs charged by Telstra Wholesale are so high there is almost nothing that an Exetel can do to provide a service at a sensible price. So you quickly move on to the three versions of ADSL2 - 'Naked', including telephone line rental and telephone line rental with another provider. Of these options, at least for Exetel because of the supplier pricing we have to deal with as a small company the only really attractive service is the ADSL2 'bundled' with a telephone service. If this view is correct then it does simplify many things for a supplier that takes this approach. One aspect of it is that all the 'savvy' broadband buyers will not want to pay the additional cost of a telephone line because they will all be using VoIP (as indeed even non-savvy users like me do). This is a 'good' thing in many ways because it means that such users (unless they are the dreaded 15 year old males whose parents pay for the connection) will not be interested in connections that include telephone line rental....even when the line rental is half what they would pay normally. Also 'savvy' users tend to download much more than non-savvy users (except those with teen age male children). So the sort of plan you can come up with for these 'non-savvy' users you can come up with a pretty simple ADSL2 plan that just charges a flat rate per month for the broadband connection of, say $A35.00 for the broadband service and another $A15.00 for the telephone line rental and no charge for data at any time of day but with the proscription that ALL file downloads are restricted 24 x 7 x 366 to dial up speed and are limited to 20 gb per month after which they are 'cut off' for the remainder of the month. Looking at Exetel's current customers such a plan would suit over 60% of our current users and would, on average, be $6.50 lower cost that is currently being paid and would only be an average of a little over $3.00 more expensive for a little less than 20% of current users. As Exetel, probably, has a higher proportion of 'heavier' downloaders than the market average it appears to me that such a plan would appeal to a much higher proportion of other ISP's users than our current 'added value' plans (which include 100 free VoIP calls as one obvious example). The other way forward in terms of plans is to offer naked plans (or 'standard ADSL2 with a conventional telephone line charged by another supplier) at a rate of $35.00 per month plus $1.00 per gb of peak usage (8 am to 2 am) and no charge from 2 am to 8am). Again looking at Exetel's "heavier" users this would be lower cost for over 85% of current users with less than 5% of users actually paying more than $10.00 a month more than they do now - which is still far cheaper than any other Australian ISP I can find in an admittedly quick scan of the major suppliers. So this is simply the results of 30 or so minutes of quick and dirty calculations using a couple of simple data base manipulations to see the effect on the current end users should new users conform to the current user's usage patterns. It needs far more serious work than I am going to find time for while on holiday but it does provide food for thought galvanised by the AAPT announcement of a 12 hour unlimited period which on closer examination isn't as attractive as I first thought - but nevertheless is still very refreshing in the dullness of the meeetoooism of the other Australian ISPs. Steve continues to progress the discussions with our Australian IP providers on providing bandwidth in new ways and we should be able to at least trial some new processes by early October with the aim of bringing out some versions of "unlimited" ADSL2 plans for November 1st 2009. At the same time it should be possible to provide a range of PAYU ($A1.00 per gb peak/no charge for 6 hours per day) plans for Naked and Other Telephone line provider to completely change the way Exetel offers ADSL in Australia (while leaving all of the current 'old' plans in place for those Exetel users who prefer them). Trackbacks
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"....but with the proscription that ALL file downloads are restricted 24 x 7 x 366 to dial up speed and are limited to 20 gb per month after which they are 'cut off' for the remainder of the month."
I understand speed restricting P2P and the like. But if you're also slowing down email attachments, windows/apple updates ect. to dial up speeds, it will make your survive quite unusable. Comment (1)
Email etc would be unaffected - only P2P/Usnet/Torrent type protocols would be affected.
Comments (4)
"with the proscription that ALL file downloads are restricted 24 x 7 x 366 to dial up speed "
why would the customer consider this plan over just going for unlimited dialup for $5 or $10 per month? Comment (1)
Because the majority of users don't use P2P etc at all and don't spend their internet lives stealing other people's property.
80% of Exetel's users, like me, use the internet for totally legitimate purposes like email, browsing, VPN and some video streaming. Comments (4)
> "So the sort of plan you can come up with for these 'non-savvy' users ... with the proscription that ALL file downloads are restricted 24 x 7 x 366 to dial up speed and are limited to 20 gb per month after which they are 'cut off' for the remainder of the month."
Wouldn't non-savvy users need high speeds for streaming youtube/iView/IPTV? or perhaps for downloading (unresized) photos from emails? Or are Exetel considering "file downloads" to be simply p2p traffic? (and perhaps binary http/ftp/usenet content) Perhaps for users needing in-between speeds, an ADSL2+ service "shaped" to 512KB or 1.5mbit (similar to HSPA speeds) would be in order? > "$35.00 per month plus $1.00 per gb of peak usage (8 am to 2 am) and no charge from 2 am to 8am)." I was going to suggest that this include a certain amount of quota ($40 for 30GB in your comment yesterday seemed fair), but a savvy user being able to manage their peak/off-peak usage, such a plan would work out $30/month cheaper than competitors! To prevent abusers of "Unlimited", why not simply charge a low cost per gig for a "6 hour true off-peak" period? (say 25c) If any user is foolish enough to download 750GB+, the user will be paying $180 extra for the month. This: a) increases revenue for Exetel as the bandwidth in "true off-peak" period is under-utilised -and- b) discourages abusers from downloading "everything in sight" just because they can (or just to see how much they can download). Excellent plan ideas. Ideally, I'd love to see peak cost around $0.72-$1/GB and off-peak around "Free"-$0.25/GB. Comments (2)
We can differentiate between youtube etc and P2P type downloads so non P2P and UseNet traffic can be identified.
In the event we proceed with such plans thet aren't intended for P2P/UseNet/Torrent etc users and we would have to make such use as difficult as possible. Comments (4)
It sounds like a good idea, if you really think you can get the identification of the problem users and their protocols right.
We need to note that bittorrent has perfectly legitimate users - CD images of Linux distributions are normally made available as bittorrent downloads - we see this all the time - although this is usually not the only way to get them and we normally prefer a simple ftp or http download; nevertheless, many open source community people get Linux images via torrent. This would be a CD or two's worth of data, not many GB, so hopefully you could build some recognition of the volume being downloaded as well as simply the protocol involved in the download to recognise the activity you want to shape. Also, this Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28company%29 describes other perfectly legitimate (commercial) uses of P2P. Comment (1)
"Non-savvy users" won't be downloading anything via bittorrent.
Comments (2)
Somehow I doubt that the target market for such plans includes people who download Linux distros.
If they did then 20 gb a month should be more than sufficient. Comments (4)
In my experience, when something is given for "free", there is always some idiot who will abuse the privilege...... and ruin the situation for all those "others" who do the right thing.
Comments (2)
I'm all for the user-pays plans (eg $1/Gb peak, free off peak).
Internet access is a utility now and should be consumption based. Water, gas electricity are are priced on usage, with peak / off-peak rates. I want my comms utility priced the same way... Comment (1)
I hope those new PAYU plans start soon..... as I am relocating to another residential unit in the same block in Brisbane CBD..
.... and now find that "the rules are" that on relocation I can only select from the currently advertised plans... ..... bit of a bummer, I'd much prefer my old PAYUDSL2 plan. H. Comments (2)
I like you're idea for plans. I'd love a PAYU plan with $1/GB. Much better than having to decide and think about my usage requirements. It would also make me think twice before downloading large files.
As for the other plan for non-savvy users, I would recommend it to my parents. It would be perfect for them. Comment (1)
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