Vonage Hits ISP Resistance
Steve Gibbard
scg at gibbard.org
Thu Mar 31 19:28:57 UTC 2005
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:
>
> Bill Nash <billn at billn.net> wrote:
>
>> I find this to be entertaining, since as a VOIP consumer, I'm reimbursing
>> my ISP for the cost of the traffic as part of my monthly tithe.
>
> Not proportional to the potential cost of providing the service.
>
> I have no idea what my cable company pays for their bandwidth, but I am
> certain it's more than the $40 per month I pay for my 3Mbps down/256 Mbps
> up... and I am able to actually *get* 3Mbps on many occasions, and I average
> between 1 and 2 (on HTTP/FTP transfers, fwiw).
>
> Yes, I know the connectivity cost is shared between several thousand
> customers in this area, but what happens if large numbers of customers
> start using VOiP on a regular basis?
I'm replying to stuff on NANOG too much. I should stop...
That said:
This is really a matter of adjusting business models as the costs of
providing various types of services change.
As others have pointed out, all end user telecommunications networks that
I'm aware of are based on some amount of oversubscription. This is not
necessarily in the sense that pipes are full and users are getting poor
service, but that it's assumed the users won't all use it at once.
When doing flat rate, unlimited use, billing, the goal is generally to set
the price such that each user covers the cost of serving the average user.
Assuming the prices aren't excessively high, the ISP or phone company (or
all you can eat restaurant, for that matter) probably loses money on its
heaviest users, does quite well on the users who barely use the service at
all, and in the end it all balances out.
But if the average user starts using the service more, the cost model
breaks. At that point the ISP or phone company needs to either find a way
to lower the cost of providing the service, discourage people from using
it, or raise prices. This isn't unique to VOIP or PtP; it's a general
issue with flat rate business models.
Another approach is to bill based on usage, in which case if you're not
losing money on every bit, you've got an incentive to encourage your
customers to use your product more. Even there, you've got
oversubscription issues to contend with: If you're billing your customers
per minute, or per megabyte, you still need to hope that they're not all
going to use the same minute, or all send their megabyte at the same time.
If they are, the model breaks and needs to be fixed somehow.
What I generally see as I look at this industry around the world, is that
pricing models adapt to fit local conditions, and continue to adapt as
those conditions change.
In the US, broadband providers tend to do flat rate billing because it's
easy to administer and it works. Colo providers tend to do usage based
billing, because the spread between the cost of hosting somebody whose
website gets occasional hits versus the cost of somebody who is constantly
saturating a 100 Mb/s pipe is just too big.
Elsewhere, things sometimes work differently. Suresh was saying earlier
that Korea Telecom is switching to usage based billing for broadband,
presumably because they hope that will be a better fit for their market
than flat rate. In Nepal, New Zealand, and Western Australia, all places
where long distance capacity is very expensive, I've seen pricing
differentiation between local and long distance Internet use. In Nepal
and Western Australia, it's been flat rate billing for local use, and per
bit billing for long distance, while in New Zealand there's at least talk
of providing New Zealand only connectivity. In the US that sounds
horrendously complicated, but where the wholesale monthly cost of
international bandwidth is $5,000 per Mb/s and the monthly cost of handing
traffic off to other local ISPs at the local exchange point is around $50
per Mb/s (Kathmandu), it makes a lot of sense.
So, I don't know if VOIP use will measurably change the costs of broadband
providers in the US. If it's only a few users, I suspect it won't. If
it's a lot of users, and there's big market demand for it, I suspect the
ISPs that survive will find a working billing model.
-Steve
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