John Linton
....or, if it's easier, what is "frills".....when stupid people use such a phrase(s) when describing an ISP?
I have seen it applied to Exetel over the years and I still have no idea what it means but at a meeting earlier last week it was casually used by one of Exetel's larger suppliers and I was so surprised at hearing it I asked them why they used that appellation? They couldn't tell me - although I pressed for a reason(s) so I got mildly annoyed (actuality I got really p***ed off) because, as far as I can see the phrase itself is pretty silly and applying it to something and then not being able to say why you have 'randomly' selected some meaningless and inapposite words makes the user even sillier - and I think I may have made that point.
I don't know what it means or why its employed in the communications industry generally or in the ISP sector particularly. I assume it's intended pejoratively but, again, I can't see how it is 'justified'. However to hear an Exetel supplier use it caused me to re-assess why he was using it about Exetel (even though he said he didn't know). Over the five plus years of Exetel's existence we have continually changed almost every aspect of what and how we provide services and, as far as I can see, when I look at the offering of other ISPs, Exetel provides more of everything than ANY other Australian ISP and provides all of the "more" at a lower cost than any other ISP.
So maybe that's the issue - we don't charge the ludicrously inflated prices of "frills" ISPs so by their definition we must offer less than they do?
But we don't charge less because we have "stripped any "frills" out of the offering" (as far as I can see, and I look fairly regularly, we offer much more than anyone else) but because our five year dedication to providing services via inbuilt efficiencies doesn't burden us with the ludicrous overheads of the "frills included" ISPs (what ever a "frill" is but presumably there must be something otherwise their couldn't be a "no frills" description).
So the lowest price (Exetel's) is not achieved by reducing anything but actually by adding a lot of things with the money saved by painstaking attention to AIMING at efficiency in every tiny aspect of running a service business and then STILL being able to continue to offer the lowest prices AND more value than any other provider.
However that has always been the case - except for the "why don't we spend hours with you on the phone teaching you how to put your user name into your modem or configure your email for the millionth time" "frill" - so is that what is meant by being a "no frills ISP"? I really can't think of anything else it might mean. So.....it's easy enough to do....offer "support" that is prepared to "help" customers with anything that can be even mildly ascribed to providing an internet service. We can put such a help function in place if we ever decide it would be useful - which for five years we haven't.
I doubt that the many, many tens of thousands of current customers who have used Exetel services for more than a year either want such a "frill" or want to pay for it . But for some new demographic customer it would be simple enough to do. I did some costings on what it would cost to provide 24 x 7 x 365 to the sort of customer whose attitude is: "let's have a chat for as long as it takes because my sheer laziness and total incompetence mean that it's much easier for me to sit on my fat backside and call you to fix something a mentally retarded guppy would be able to do in their sleep" as being their definition of "customer support".
The cost to us would be around $7.00 an hour to provide "support" to people who have a service that works at the rated speed but want to waste someone's time untangling aspects of their use that they should really be able to do for themselves but choose not to. So a consideration in 'releasing' new plans in July will be to include either a separately charged function or build it in to the price of the plans themselves. If it was separately charged then we would create a 'buy in advance amount of support' with the ability to top it up if the customer ever wanted it - perhaps include an hour "free" in the initial sign up and provide a top up facility in the user facilities at say - $10.00 an hour. If it was built in - meaning that the reasonable customers paid for hand holding of nonessential issues for the unreasonable customers - it would add around $2.00 a month to every new plan.
Either way - it can be done.
I guess the other issue is not to assume that not all customers are reasonably sensible and understand that P2P downloads should be set for an incredibly generous off peak where they cost nothing against download allowances and don't place strains on various sectors of the network. It always seemed to me that anyone who had used the internet for a few nanoseconds would grasp that pretty basic situation but I have been consistently wrong. So this means we need to remove the NetEnforcer from the current network and replace the 'controls' that provides with raw bandwidth. I haven't worked out the cost of doing this yet but will complete the calculations, and get them double checked, over the next 72 hours.
If my initial calculations are remotely correct then it would cost, at today's IP and back haul prices, approximately $A1.80 per customer per month to provide P2P users in peak times with no P2P restraints. Of course the issue is that 80% of our current customers (a very conservative figure as I think it's closer to 95%) don't use P2P at all or not in peak times so, once again, there is a $A2.00 per month cost for all customers so that a very small minority can indulge themselves unnecessarily - though they certainly wouldn't see it that way.
If you follow this probably poorly set out 'logic' it seems that to eliminate the pejorative misuse of the meaningless words "no frills" all that is required is to increase broad band plan prices by $A5.00 and remove:
60 gb of peak for free 12 hours each day
100 free VoIp calls
30 free SMS
10 free Faxes
30% to 50% more peak quota than most other ISPs
Free fixed IP
Free DID
and ......whatever else we were thinking of providing in the future......but then what the f*** would be the point of being in business?