Sunday, November 15. 2009HSPA For Business (2)John Linton I spent an hour or so yesterday looking through the web based information on HSPA offerings for businesses but found practically nothing - actually nothing - making me believe that I was looking in the wrong places or I was suffering from some sort of mental aberration that refused to recognise information as relating to business. If you don't believe me try typing in "wireless broadband for business" or something like it and see what you can find. See what I mean? So one example among many is Optus, who provide Layer 2 HSPA services to Exetel, think a business is even stupider than a residential user and start off with an offer of $A1.00 per MEGABYTE and then add to the jocularity by stating that the user must spend $A10.00 a MONTH - I would think that at that rate you'd be lucky to get ten minutes usage for $A10.00: It actually didn't get any better as I tried to find specific plans for a business user - again, perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. However I genuinely couldn't find anything in something over 2 hours of looking that could, in any sense of the word, relate to a business user with the few references I did find simply more expensive versions of retail plans. After an hour or so it began to dawn on me that the people offering HSPA to the Australian market actually didn't consider there was such a market and all they were doing was taking a retail 'package' (either directly packaged by the carrier or just bought directly from the carrier and 'retail packaged by the re-seller) and trying to pass it off as a 'business' offering (in all its retail shop packaging garishness).....or that's what a hour or so of looking on the web seemed to produce. Presumably all the businesses that buy wireless broadband for commercial use are content that this is the case because it doesn't seem to be any different across the 9 carriers/resellers I looked at. So I stopped wasting my time and decided to use my own, simplistic, views to determine what a 'business' HSPA service would need to look like and I came up with this list: 1) Needed to be a 'fleet' offering in that there was no minimum spend per service but that there was a single tariff that applied to the aggregate of all services for data used in a monthly period. Alternately provide an 'included' number of gigabytes at a fixed monthly price with an 'excess' usage per gb charge....option decided by the customer. 2) One above meant that there were no prices per 1,2,3,etc gigabytes per service (no individual service plans) but a sensible per mb price applied to total monthly usage....1.5 cents per mb or a stepped set of rates depending on usage. 3) There were no emails or any other per service inclusions because the HSPA service was simply a 'tool' to access the company's intranet. 4) Because it was simply a 'tool' it had to have a fixed IP so that there was no need to modify any company's back end security systems. 5) A choice of being used in a mobile hand set (sim only) or via a computer (needing an HSPA modem); if by handset also providing the ability of using VoIP/HSPA to reduce mobile call costs. 6) An end userĀ 'portal' was required to allow the customer to order and cancel services and have access to running totals of usage by service and by 'fleet' at any time and to add and change individual user details as employees within the company changed over time. This to be customisable to some extent by the individual end user. 7) One, easy to understand monthly invoice listing the charges by service and the summed total of the usage by 'fleet' for the month...customer choice of a separate bill or an inclusion on an Exetel bill containing other services. I'm sure that there are many other simple to implement functions that could be used and people with knowledge and intellectual skills different/superior to mine would come up with them in a flash and, should you wish to share them I would be grateful for the advice. If I was buying HSPA services for my company I would include the 7 things I listed above as essentials and if I spent more than the ten minutes it took me to compile that list I would probably come up with a fair few more. So why isn't there such a wireless broadband business offering on any wireless broadband supplier's web site? No demand - very unlikely. There must be some other reason that is escaping me....perhaps they can't adapt their billing/fulfillment software? If you have any ideas on what a business wireless broadband offering should include please drop me a line. Trackbacks
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I think you are about about right with your list.
We get phoned all the time by carriers who say they'll do whatever it takes to get our business and then offer the same unbelievably thoughtless "design" of plan which is a thinly-disguised me-too retail offering at a price which only a fool would accept (and then they wonder why you don't order it). My only conclusion is that big customers who "matter" to the carriers are big and ugly enough to dictate their own terms and negotiate special deals with the carrier's salespeople, and that SMEs just get screwed with the domestic user/retail offerings. Australian telcos seem to be run by very stupid and inflexible people. The limit of their flexibility and innovation is shared spend. The only addition I'd make to your list is to ensure easy administration of the services for all the usual silly things that happen in fleets, like having to identify identify which user is letting their kid use the corporate SIM for P2P, and temporarily or permanently blocking services whose SIMs have been lost/stolen or have disappeared with an ex-employee who has taken off with the company mobile or laptop and isn't going to give it back. Comment (1)
I think such a user portal, if we ever went ahead with these ideas, would develop like our residential customer portal - each good new idea would be incorporated.
I think you are quite right that the user's ability to suspend or cancel any service at any time would be essential. Comments (12)
For a comparison of services similar to HSPA sim for use in a mobile handset, that is being offered to businesses, you would have to look at the various Blackberry type offerings.
I think they are more expensive than your offerings but might have a better all round package when it comes to office based applications (email/chat etc.) and security (VPN/secure comms). Comment (1)
Lawrie,
You may well be right - but, obviously, HSPA has email/chat/etc - all internet capabilities. Comments (12)
I didn't quite get my idea across.
Yes the application suite is the easy bit. I was trying to make sure that the business apps were combined with the security capability so as to meet the company's security requirements. This may take the form of a VPN connection (may be difficult depending on handset used) or it may be that the user is connected directly to the corporate network at layer 2 as soon as they authenticate the 3g connection. Comment (1)
Or perhaps augmenting the existing Exetel VPN product range?
For example, say Exetel gives a customer a private IP range of 10.1.1.0/24 for their SHDSL/Ethernet based VPN. The HSDPA services could be given the range of 10.1.2.0/24, and be routed to the company's Exetel endpoint of choice so they can apply whatever rules to the traffic they need to. This would make sense as a product for my company, for example. Comment (1)
Thank you for the suggestion - I will pass it on to Steve.
Comments (12)
We have offered the option of private IP addressing for branch offices or remote sites with our VPN product for some time. So it is fairly easy to extend that to the HSPA service as well.
I can't add the diagrams here, but you can see the service descriptions in my blog post today here: http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/223-HSPA-For-Fleets.html Comment (1)
Steve's answer to both:
"We can assign fleet HSPA IP addresses to all be within the same IP address block. That will make it easier for the company buying it to modify their firewall policy. We can also assign the IP addresses out of private IP address space - Internet access for the HSPA service would then be via the company firewall/NAT service rather than directly from Exetel." Comments (12)
That would be an excellent feature for larger customers that have suitable networks
For smaller situations would it be possible to have some kind of user facility where the service could be locked down to restrict ports or give some kind of firewall options, or perhaps an opt in proxy, a lot of these HSPA services aren't connected to routers so they can be open to any compromises etc Comment (1)
All of those sorts of things can be made user options.
Comments (12)
As you said yesterday, there's a fair chance that some businesses have tried the HSPA route with Telstra and were badly burnt. I suspect that individual employees who want remote access might instead be buying the retail products themselves, but I could be wrong.
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Pretty sure that's a typo in point 2.
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Thank you Thomas - I've fixed it - I didn't pick it up from the previous comment.
Comments (12)
"$1 per MB ($10 minimum spend)"
"Safety Cap: $60 for up to 3GB" At least there is a safety cap. Although you be paying $60 from 60 MB onwards up to 3 GB. Hmm. Bodgy. Comment (1)
I can't offer any suggestions to the business ideas, I'm just an employee But I suspect the Optus crappy plan you mentioned is just there to make the others look slightly more appealing. No one would get it. But when comparing... makes the big better. Like a small big mac meal... That's funny.. small big hehe.
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You should consider allowing customers to "portal" the access - allowing only VPN traffic to their concentrator or only port 80 traffic to the customers proxy. From a large fleet of telstra users we often get management complaints to "run reports" on how a $4k bill happened when every other user is sub $100
Comment (1)
It would be great if you could create one business fleet plan for business mobile phone SIMs and mobile broadband SIMs.
The current HSPA voice rates are not competitive with your business fleet mobile plans, and the data rates on the mobile fleet plans are more expensive than the HSPA data rates. Combine the best of both, so a business customer could combine all mobile phones and HSPA stick SIMs on one plan. Comments (3)
Let me just start out by saying that the company I work for will not accept internet services that are not 100% fixed price. Even if that means we pay an absolute fortune (which we do). The basis is that we know what is going out each month without variables and it is easily accounted for. I have tried to get the australian offices to switch from Verison (damn they are expensive) to Exetel but without a fixed price plan we will never shift.
3) Agreed 4) Not necessary - Everyone should be way more secure than that. We have VPN and Nokia firewalls using secure client. 5) In our company the guys already have phones, they just need wireless internet. 6) Agreed however finance do most things over the phone, IT would require a portal to make sure the sytem was not being abused. 7) Agreed! Currently we are with Optus on the retail plan which gives us 5GB with a rediculous charge. We have approx 40% of dongles per office staff in each region. Hope you come up with something great! Ron Comment (1)
My wish list having been responsible from corporate telecoms accounts using Optus, Macquarie Telecom, & Telstra as suppliers:
1/ Option to create additional logins to the corporate portal and setup user groups. 2/ Option to group corporate numbers for reporting / access control purposes. 3/ Ability per group to control access to functions and particular mobile numbers. 4/ Ability to check and change: International Roaming & International Dial settings per phone or group. 5/ Ability to order phones through Exetel and have them billed on the monthly bill (NOTE: Doesn't have to be a discount purchase, just the ease of dealing with a single supplier). Comment (1)
Thank you for the suggestions.
I think we do most of that already (except for the handset ordering) but I will add them to the list I'm compiling anyway. Comments (12)
One other thing which would need to be fixed for business customers are the Usage Interim Payment requests.
Having to pay for every $25 of usage is a bit of a pain in the neck. Comments (3)
That wouldn't apply to a business account.
In the nanny State society we now live in it's necessary for residential customers because it's "Exetel's Fault" if we allow them to use their service as they choose without taking responsibility for their own carelessness. Comments (12)
As one of your current business customers (very small one), I do currently receive these notifications for HSPA services linked to our business mobile account.
Comments (3)
If we create a business HSPA plan it will not have that function.
Comments (12)
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