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PaxioPremium
join:2011-02-23
Santa Clara, CA
kudos:1 | Do you prefer caps or usage billing? Honestly, since ISPs (well, small ISPs anyway) pay for their transport by a loose usage-based model, they must either limit their customers somehow or charge them if they use "too much." (The threshold of which will vary according to the price of the service and cost of the transport.) Even a "slow" 5M connection could consume something like 13TB in a month if used 24/7. Who would use a connection this much? Bittorrent users and other P2P services, typically.
The ISP pays by a model called "burstable billing" which is not precisely a "cents per bit" model so it's hard to correlate this expense. But I can say that the transport for this user would cost far more than the ISP receives in monthly revenue.
So ISPs limit customers with either overt "caps" or softer "acceptable use policies" which allow them to move a problem user to a higher tier, or discontinue service for the egregious data users who won't migrate to the higher tier.
Under this reality, is usage-based billing really a non-starter?
What if a company offered BOTH billing models? Flat-rate pricing with some sort of data limit, and a TRUE usage-based billing model that more closely reflected the ISPs actual cost of providing the data? No ISP to my knowledge offers this flexibility today, but it seems it might offer the best of both worlds.
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| said by Paxio:What if a company offered BOTH billing models? Flat-rate pricing with some sort of data limit, and a TRUE usage-based billing model that more closely reflected the ISPs actual cost of providing the data? No ISP to my knowledge offers this flexibility today, but it seems it might offer the best of both worlds. [soapbox]I'd be fine with metered billing. So long as that meter is accurate and independently verifiable, of which none of the recent ones are. For flat rate fee, don't get on the airwaves and advertise unlimited data at blazing speeds when the reality is you are going to cap me at a paltry 2GB and then throttle my 75/50 service down to 3/1 until the next billing cycle.
As previously stated, your company should have been investing in its infrastructure as it was growing to accommodate the load. Waiting until the last minute then scrambling for a half-assed solution is what kids do in elementary school when they have a book report due the next day that they were told about two weeks ago.
Its no different than public roads. The roads are crap, filled with more pot holes than dotted lines so we need to raise the gas tax everywhere and introduce a mileage tax for the hybrid cars to get the roads back to a good condition. Wait, where did all the tax money go that you've been collecting since the road was in a new condition? Oh that's right, you raided that fund to cover up your non-existent budget skills when you burned through all the other trust funds [/soapbox]
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"My weakness is that I care too much" | |
Kamus
join:2011-01-27
El Paso, TX | reply to Paxio
Howbout, neither?
The speeds cable companies offer make it impossible to congest the network to begin with. | |
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