Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

Mon Dec 25 22:13:02 UTC 2006

On Mon, 25 Dec 2006, Simon Leinen wrote:

> Yes.  With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users'
> consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP
> doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
> traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
> our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how
> digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.

Also, doing fine grained measurements for all your customers (if you have 
millions of residential users) is a big pain. Yes, it makes sense to only 
count usage perhaps between 16.00-02.00 or so, but trying to do this in an 
efficient manner and handle the customer complaint calls might very well 
be more expensive than actually not doing it at all.

Cost of customer interaction should never be underestimated. The simpler 
the service, the less things that can go wrong, the less customer service 
calls you get.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se