John Linton
....I usually inhabit a more rational world where logic and some, basic, consideration for other people is more prevalent than here.... and without sounding too cloying - problems are what management are employed to solve not say that they are 'givens' and a cost of business that can't be changed.(I thought of using this line in more than 30 email replies I wrote over the weekend).
Perhaps it isn't a given to many of the people who wrote to me over the past 72 hours that to become part of the management of a start up company that has managed to stay in existence for five and a half years and has grown to become able to provide services to over 100,000 users and earn revenues of over $A4 million a month you would, almost certainly, have to have some realistic knowledge of how to deliver ISP and other communications services to a wide range of end users in ways that would allow them to continue to consider your company as a supplier they would stay with because they found your services adequate (hopefully better than adequate) to meet their needs.
This seems to be the case based on the number of emails I have received recently that start with the phrase: "I have worked for ISPs for the past n years and know....." or words to that effect. I, too have worked in the management of ISPs for almost as long as there has been an ISP 'industry' in Australia and, more than that, I have invested/risked a considerable amount of my own money in doing that so I, too, have some knowledge of the issues involved in running an ISP business - something I would have thought was obvious. I would be the first to admit that my knowledge is far from complete and that, as the ISP business changes all of the time, I certainly have many gaps in my knowledge. However I would also suggest that my knowledge and second by second 'devotion' to trying to better understand what is going on in the twists and turns and new developments in this area of commercial and technical life is better based and far more comprehensive than all but a very few people in this industry in Australia and far better than those casual criticisers who recently wrote to me.
So for the "I have worked for a zillion years in ISPs" people let me spell out the facts of network provisioning life for you in a way that is different to what your "years of being involved in ISPs" should have taught you but apparently hasn't.
A Network Should Always Be Provisioned To Allow For Greater Capacity Than Peak Usage Is Not A Sensible View - In Isolation
Yes it should. However if that becomes the only criterion used then that network owner is never going to be able to deliver the service at the lowest cost to their internal or external end users and therefore can never offer a realistically priced service irrespective of how much 'economy of scale' is developed.
ANY network owner MUST make every attempt possible to minimise both cost and just as importantly, WASTE, to ensure the network is operated as efficiently as possible.
The ONLY way to do this is to make every encouragement to the network users to utilise any recurrent 'unused' times in the day, the week and the time of year. For instance, dating from the earliest days of commercial computer systems (before networks) NO commercial company would do their file back ups during the working day because of the negative effects that would have on the 'end user'. Today NO network provider does their 'network maintenance' during peak end user time (whatever that may be) for the same reason.
Similarly the concept of 'peak and off peak time' came in to common parlance because most commercial computers and networks had relatively little use for large periods of the early morning hours. Now the network operator that just shrugs their shoulders and takes the view that there will always be a 'peak time' and by definition that means there will always be an 'off peak' time is foolish in the extreme because it means they have no real concept of how to manage a business beyond some very narrow experiences and capabilities - or perhaps a lack of intellectual capacity.
On a network usage graph this is illustrated by a sine curve that has a dramatic 'peak' followed by a major 'trough' followed by a dramatic 'peak' followed by a......you get the picture. Depending on the degree of careless attitude of the network owner/decision maker this will mean that something like 30% (sometimes more) of the network capacity will be 'wasted because the peaks are relatively steep and short and the troughs relatively deep and long.
If we were in the days of 'dial up' ISPs then there was very little that could be done because the users and their usage were based almost 100% on interactive applications and the number of people sitting at a keyboard at 3 am in the morning was a tiny fraction of the number of people who were sitting at a keyboard at 9 pm every night. Then automated downloads and ADSL were invented - and so was the ability to reduce the waste of bandwidth cost. For those of you that are Exetel users you will see that the single sine curve of bandwidth usage has now been significantly altered to almost the reverse and significantly flattened. The 'peak' usage is no longer 9 pm it is 2 am and the period 2 am to 12 noon that used to be the 'depths' of the bandwidth trough has now become much more completely used.
This is because, duh, the network owner has provided 'incentives' for Exetel users to use this previously 'dead' time for Exetel users to move their heavy downloading to and therefore not only giving these users more download allowance for less (actually 60 gb for 'free') but has significantly lessened the use of the old 'peak' periods allowing more users to use the same amount of bandwidth therefore lowering the costs for all users.
So, once more for the dummies, this in turn means that the network owner can provide all customers with more for less because the previous unused bandwidth costs are now reduced and therefore the overall cost of a gigabyte of download is reduced in cost which means that the cost of the service can be reduced.
If NO action was taken to use the 'off peak' usefully the cost per gigabyte would be unnecessarily higher than a sensible management could, with some effort and pain, make it.
QED: A supplier that claims there is no advantage in trying to 'flatten the sine curve' is either stupid or has wrought a miracle of end user usage balance.....or as appears to be the case in Australia - just uses a cost plus pricing model because they see no competition.