John Linton .....change 'the rules' and try again.
For well over five years we have been trying to find ways of giving Exetel customers the maximum 'free' download allowances, over the longest possible period, for the lowest possible monthly cost without sending ourselves broke. For well over five years we have spent more and more money buying more bandwidth than we needed to try and meet an ever higher end user, very brief, 'peak' demand. For well over five years we have put more management and engineering time into trying to achieve this than we have in to any other aspect of the business. For well over five years we have failed to achieve this pretty simple objective. We gave up on trying to do this last Friday at midnight.
I was bitterly disappointed that with all the 'thought' and 'knowledge' and sheer effort of persuasion we had put into this key aspect of our business we had never been able to sensibly achieve it - I don't think I've ever been more frustrated over such a long period of time in the whole of my life - I just could never find a way of doing something that was so basically simple but proved to be so ridiculously and impossibly difficult. So we gave up and solved all our problems by simply giving up on making a 12 hour period available. Instead of the beautifully symmetric, and very visually appealing, 12 hours we have had to settle for ten hours because we could never find a way of dealing with a relatively very small number of user's obduracy and senselessness. A galling failure over a huge period of time.
Unlike every one of our competitors (or at least I assume this is the case) we have never been concerned about making as much money as possible from providing our services - we have always been driven by the objective of providing the best possible value. One way of doing this is to make use of the 'dead' bandwidth that exists on virtually very commercial network (though I have known of at least two exceptions) in the early hours of the morning. Typically on an efficiently utilised network such as Exetel's this costs us (at our current size) well over $A150,000 a month and the bandwidth is completely wasted. Simple solution offer it to your user base at no cost to them - how, over a five year period could you fail to make that work?.....giving away $A150,000 a month worth of services.....not a problem in the world. We couldn't do it - rather than using the virtually unused 3 am to 7 am period to set a schedule of downloads our user base insisted on starting them at one second past midnight EVERY night and, for over 90% of those users their downloads were completed by 12.30 am EVERY morning. Could they be persuaded to start their downloads after 2 am?......nothing we could do for five plus years could make that happen.
It was, is, an humiliating failure of communication and a shocking indictment of my personal terrible inability to persuade people to do what is obviously in their own and every other user's best interests to do. So there now exists a significant loss of 'appeal' of Exetel's services caused by, by my estimate, something less than 1,000 users. For a business to lose a significant operating advantage and all of its other customers to lose a significant usage benefit due to the thoughtless and senseless actions of a relatively few users is a devastating condemnation of the management of any company that could allow this to happen - and I am solely to blame for this failure.
So, the current change to 10 hours has instantly fixed the problem caused by 1,000 users if the results of the first four nights of the new scenario is to continue. We will make some slight adjustments over the balance of August to attempt to get the maximum improvements from the new times and then I'm going on holidays for a few weeks. We will track the results throughout September and if the current results continue we will have, finally, solved the problem that has proved to be impossible for the past five or so years.
However we will have also accomplished something else. We will have developed the basis for returning to the 12 midnight to 12 midday 'free' download period by the start of November - assuming that the current usage patterns continue - but this time without the previous issue. It isn't a 'back flip' if in fact we can do that because to do it we would have had to go through this, to me unnecessary, period first. Of course, there'll have to be one minor change because I'm sure there will always be a tiny minority of people who will always try to screw things up for the majority because the ass**** factor is now a permanent presence in twenty first century life.
One of the unprovable 'business school myths' (similar to the "every unhappy customer etc" nonsense) is that EVERY service provider would be better off without 1% - 2% (depending how unlucky they are) of their customers.