approval from:
woodward 
| It really amazes me how much bandwidth a person can use... And it really amazes me that I am the admin of a provider that finally got its first over-usage fees this month for going over the contracted bandwidth amounts. Those fees were steep, but it still is even more impressing to realize this:
Out of 1500 customers with packages ranging from 1.5mbps to 6mbps symmetrical (most of them are on the 1.5mbps and 3.0mbps packages):
(1) most users on the cheapest package use the most bandwidth. Only 1 out of the top 10 users is on the 6mbps package... and they're a business!
(2) The amount of Internet traffic consumed for all 1500 users and among all service packages was 11.42TB total. This equaled out to 3.44TB outbound (to the Internet) and 7.98TB inbound (from the Internet)
(3) Out of all of that traffic, I have colocated servers and other hosting servers as well as our backoffice computers which use, and this is a liberal estimate, 1TB of bandwidth per month.
So how can one person, one single individual, make use of and actually benefit from any amount of content that can consume a half to a full terabyte a month when a legitimate ISP can run all of its network operations, email servers, web servers, colocated servers, updates, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still barely use that amount of data?
I remember when I got FIOS and I went on a downloading/uploading spree to test the down and upload speeds and it was great, but after uploading 400 gigs in one month using bittorrent, I then realized that only about 1/10th of the downloaded content even got used, and then the uploaded content was the waste of bandwidth.
So how does that relate to what I was saying earlier? I pay $X per megabit of bandwidth, and I had an overage when I used 11 terabytes in a month. The realistic total of used bandwidth was an average of 33mbps, of which 18 was part of 20 I was not billed for. Out of the other 15 I was 5 over my committed level of 10mbps, and I had to pay $125 per megabit of bandwidth as a penalty. So if that happens to a person that has a commitment for 30mbps of bandwidth, then I believe Comcast and the other cable providers should use the same limits.
It would certainly make people more responsible with their bandwidth. Of course I also like the other aspect too -- if you're going to plainly cut them off, at least a penalty keeps your customers. 
And for the final note: I would NEVER cut off an end user for excessive utilization. There are about 2-3% of my customers that hit 60-100 gigs per month and I wouldn't cut them off because it's not the right thing to do. Even though I only make $40 per month off of those, you can still see how it fits in the big picture. If I cut off one person they're going to tell 10 people not to go with the service I offer which is the only option in most of the areas that we cover. Instead I use the money from the lower 95% of customers to improve the network to those people who use the most because they're also the ones that talk to people and get the name out. We haven't done any direct (or really much indirect) marketing in 2 years and we still have more installs coming in than we can do! |
