Lessons from the AU model

Alastair Johnson aj at sneep.net
Tue Jan 22 10:09:00 UTC 2008


Mark Newton wrote:

> Despite the best efforts of some people to run their broadband
> access at line rate, residential broadband is very much a
> "CIR + burst" kind of service.  All of our customers can burst
> to line rate (they're paying for it, so they should be able to
> get it).  None of our customers can burst at line rate 24x7 for
> a month without paying for it.  You can work out the CIR by
> dividing the number of bits in the quota by the number of
> seconds in a month.

Indeed.  If you look at New Zealand, a very similar economic model to
Australia (except less population and a much bigger density problem),
there are regulated wholesale products[1,2,3] that offer a 32Kbps CIR 
per subscriber, and linerate PIR.

32Kbps working out to approximately 10GB per month, you can guess what
the most common subscriber data cap is - and surprisingly few actually
exceed it, although it has definitely gone up.  Incidentally, the
incumbent in NZ launched a flat rate DSL package.  It did not go well,
and ultimately cost them several million dollars in subscriber refunds.

Perhaps some of the guys posting on this thread (Mark? MMC?) would be 
able to provide an average subscriber bandwidth (in GB or Kbit/s) use of 
their subscriber base.  Break it down by <10G, >40G type accounts?

aj

[1] 
http://www.comcom.govt.nz/IndustryRegulation/Telecommunications/Wholesale/Overview.aspx 
for what the regulator is doing
[2] http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,205743-204225,00.html?nv=tpd
[3] http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,204215-204225,00.html?nv=sd



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