John Linton
....it's, more often than one might think, because you are not 'looking at it' the right way.
A boring, and often infuriating, aphorism but actually it is quite true - irrespective of how smart you think you are. I am no different to anyone else (and I think I've got the remains of a very good mind as well as being much more creative than 'average') in that I sometimes simply give up on some problem or solution on the basis that I know I've tried everything and nothing works only to realise that I've been insisting on trying to batter the door down with my fists instead of looking for the key. So it has been with the five plus years of failure to find a solution to the 'off peak' usage issue with too many people insisting on starting P2P downloads on the stroke of midnight. We failed to deal with that 20 minute period and had to give up on a very important marketing advantage - the pleasing symmetry of two 12 hour periods and all of the 'operational' advantages that gives to the end user.
I'm not sure how long it took, perhaps as little as 5 or 6 days to realise that there was a blindingly obvious solution that could, with a little bit of creative negotiation with a willing 'partner' allow us to reap the benefits of our five years of pain and sorrow and actually deliver the true 'Holy Grail' of network management - something our give up solution of August 1st had finally made clear to us - though not in a way that we expected........that after five years of trying we hadn't failed at all we had managed to reverse the usual bandwidth usage from 80% of usage being peak and 20% off peak to 60% of usage being off peak and only 40% peak. Only that !@#$%^&* 12midnight to 12.20 am period had defeated us to the point where we hadn't noticed what we had achieved and we gave up and changed the start of off peak to 2.00 am. Perhaps it was just the final freedom of not having to worry about how to fix that single issue that allowed the mind to look at it differently? Who knows?
There is no particular advantage of a 12/12 split between peak and off peak periods in any real sense - as long as the pricing is set correctly there is no problem in 'losing' the 2 hours of potential peak time excess usage charges.....they are not a significant amount in any event. It isn't really of any value to an end user - 60 gb can be downloaded in a ten or even an eight hour or less period for those users who download the whole 60 gb in any single month. It is mainly for the 'look' that the value of a twelve hour 'off peak' period is of value to Exetel and it is a differentiator between Exetel and the many ISPs that now do something in terms of 'off peak' allowances, and will, presumably keep doing that.
Personally, after all the years of trying, I can see only two ways of resolving the 'midnight' issue. The first way is what we have set out to do at the moment - put back the start time of 'off peak' to 2 am and use the 'dissatisfaction' that has caused to make sure the point is made that it makes absolutely no difference to anyone if they start their downloads at 2 am rather than 12 midnight and actually three am also makes absolutely no difference. After a month this should be blindingly obvious to any Exetel customer who uses the service and the graphs starkly demonstrate it is the case. If we wished to we could now 'offer' the 12 midnight to 2 am period as 'bonus' off peak for those users who wished to use it for non P2P/Torrent/Whatever use (those that wanted to use it for such downloads could retain it as 'peak'. I was happy with that possible solution until some unethical, and based on their interpretation of my words, functionally illiterate 'journalists' turned that concept into an hysterical dog's breakfast of gross misinterpretation. I saw that any attempt to do that would generate too much 'support' and 'administration' time.
So, reluctantly, we put that on hold and looked at the situation from a different perspective again and then realised that there was quite possibly a different solution that we had created the opportunity of delivering that none of our competitors could copy and that would be totally 'clean' and offer an even more attractive solution that any previous iteration we had tried to implement. It only requires finding one or more 'partners' willing to look outside the pricing 'me tooism' so entrenched in this industry and come up with a different pricing structure to take advantage of the facts that have been known for decades.
I discussed this possibility with one possible 'partner' earlier this week and have raised it by email with another one and will hopefully get some sort of positive response in the near future which will allow us to finalise a contract over the coming few weeks. If we can do that then we can almost certainly bring another true innovation to broadband downloads and pricing for the Australian marketplace....one with very real customer benefits....and very real Exetel + Partner benefits.
One more example that nothing is impossible if you stop getting frustrated at your previous failures, relax and look at any problem from a different angle.