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SuperWISP
join:2007-04-17
Laramie, WY

SuperWISP

Member

And so.... What pricing model is left?

I'm an ISP, and the brouhaha over Time Warner's caps has me worried as to whether I can continue in business. In the long run, I need to have pricing which is attractive, competitive, and fair, and at the same time not run afoul of any regulatory or legislative constraints.

The problem is that the lobbyists seem to be trying to make this impossible. First, they lobby the FCC to prohibit flat rate pricing with constraints on usage (e.g. throttling, duty cycle constraints, or limits on bandwidth-hogging activities such as P2P). Now, they lobby against variable pricing (caps and overage charges). What's left? Bandwidth costs money. A LOT of money in rural areas. And we have to cover costs.

One wonders whether their real goal is to make it impossible to be a for-profit ISP (or even a non-profit ISP which is not taxpayer-subsidized).

jsz0
Premium Member
join:2008-01-23
Jewett City, CT

jsz0

Premium Member

That's the big drawback here that I don't think most people understand yet. I doubt TWC (and others) are going to be rushing out now to upgrade their networks. They're going to say "You only want to pay $40? Well we only want to spend $X for upgrades. Deal with it" Bad situation I think. I'd personally rather have caps and faster speeds as opposed to no caps and slower speeds.

DataRiker
Premium Member
join:2002-05-19
00000

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said by SuperWISP:

I'm an ISP, and the brouhaha over Time Warner's caps has me worried as to whether I can continue in business. In the long run, I need to have pricing which is attractive, competitive, and fair, and at the same time not run afoul of any regulatory or legislative constraints.

The problem is that the lobbyists seem to be trying to make this impossible. First, they lobby the FCC to prohibit flat rate pricing with constraints on usage (e.g. throttling, duty cycle constraints, or limits on bandwidth-hogging activities such as P2P). Now, they lobby against variable pricing (caps and overage charges). What's left? Bandwidth costs money. A LOT of money in rural areas. And we have to cover costs.

One wonders whether their real goal is to make it impossible to be a for-profit ISP (or even a non-profit ISP which is not taxpayer-subsidized).
Well I sympathize with your situation actually, but I think you should think of a better strategy for obtaining your main points of bandwidth.

Cogent offers all you can eat fiber for dirt cheap, but they have a limited service area.

I am just curious, how do you obtain your bandwidth that makes it so expensive? (are you on copper?)--Yes I realize that your a wireless company--
Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO

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SuperWISP

Since you are in Wyoming, in which each person has 5+ square miles all to their lonesome, you are in a unique position. Since there are no major metro areas in the entire state, there is no significant competition to supply backbone bandwidth. In almost every major metro city (say of at least 100K people) you can buy transit bandwidth at $10-12 per Mbps. Now one can argue that the ISPs are not providing service to the sparsely populated areas becuase of the expense of covering that much area with that small a population, but you cannot argue that becuase bandwidth in WY is expensive you can charge outrageous amounts in the metro areas.

SpaethCo
Digital Plumber
MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN

SpaethCo

MVM

You're both missing the point. It's not just the backbone bandwidth -- you need to get bandwidth to your radios out in the field, which usually means expensive LEC backhaul circuits.
SuperWISP
join:2007-04-17
Laramie, WY

SuperWISP to DataRiker

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to DataRiker
Apparently, many of the people commenting here do not understand the logistics of obtaining bandwidth.

You can obtain bandwidth for $10 per Mbps per month at a major Internet hub.... Less if you are a really huge customer.

But then you have to get it out of that hub and transport it 10, 20, 50, 100 miles to the main router which is the center of your "last mile" network. That transport is generally provided by the local telephone company, which (because it is competition with you) charges you more per Mbps to transport the bandwidth than it cost you at the hub.

Even the big guys, like Time-Warner, pay about $30-40 per Mbps by the time they get the bandwidth to the last mile network, even if they're just going to the suburbs. I pay about $100 per Mbps. Some ISPs pay $325 to $400 per Mbps.

If a user leaves a 1 Mbps stream on 24x7 (and users are starting to treat streaming video as if it were the TV and leaving it on), it costs the ISP that much per month.

A bit of arithmetic tells the rest of the story.
jjeffeory
jjeffeory
join:2002-12-04
Bloomington, IN

jjeffeory to jsz0

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If they're not going to upgrade and there are problems like this. I'd RATHER just find another ISP. If there's an alternative around.
Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO

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Many of us do understand. Again WY in particular and rural areas in general do get stuck with the costs you are talking about. But in Metro areas the ISPs themselves have those lines that run right up to the central hubs. This is why the major ISPs all have their own (mini) backbones. These mini backbones radiate out from the metro cities to the smaller suburban areas. So the suburban head ends daisy chain into the core hub via the more central head ends. It is only when the distance between head ends becomes too great (WY is way too far out) that they switch to using the telecom fiber instead of their own fiber. Charter is a good example. My traceroutes will hit 5-6 hops(on Charter) BEFORE they hit the transit line. As you get further out from St. Louis the number of hops within charter (generally) grow, until you hit the next central area that they run.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

In addendum, some cablecos in all likelihood run their own fiber. It's not just the domain of the telcos anymore. Around here, I'm a few ms from Comcast's Denver hub and it's all Comcast fiber AFAIK from here to there. Pretty sure the pricing would be rather unsustainable otherwise; Qwest is gigging my school $5k per month for an OC3 point to point...

As for your situation, maybe that's where stimulus money should go: fiber backbones for WiSPs . Back in TX, loop for a T3 runs $4000 due to the ILEC, WIndstream...and that's 40 miles away from where the WiSP ends up piping in the sunlight.

I have no problem with caps etc., but the charge for 'em has to be remotely comparable to the cost of the bits. For a WiSP I'm fine paying $1 per GB if they have to haul their stuff in at $100 per Mbit. For cable that runs their own fiber from a peering point (free bandwidth) or transit hub (just saw $2.25 per Mbit, $4 per Mbit on a 200 Mbit commit) it's freaking inadmissible.

jsz0
Premium Member
join:2008-01-23
Jewett City, CT

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There's also the factor of last-mile bandwidth in cable networks. 38Mbit downstreams get saturated pretty quickly when every customer is using a fairly constant 2Mbit/sec+ In most cases the solution is fairly easy -- add more downstreams. Easy but not cheap. That could be $100k per headend/hub-site and might require dropping analog channels or over-compressing HDs for the channel space to utilize more DOCSIS downstreams. So for a company like TWC that could easily be hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide.
88615298 (banned)
join:2004-07-28
West Tenness

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said by SuperWISP:

I'm an ISP, and the brouhaha over Time Warner's caps has me worried as to whether I can continue in business. In the long run, I need to have pricing which is attractive, competitive, and fair, and at the same time not run afoul of any regulatory or legislative constraints.

The problem is that the lobbyists seem to be trying to make this impossible. First, they lobby the FCC to prohibit flat rate pricing with constraints on usage (e.g. throttling, duty cycle constraints, or limits on bandwidth-hogging activities such as P2P). Now, they lobby against variable pricing (caps and overage charges). What's left? Bandwidth costs money. A LOT of money in rural areas. And we have to cover costs.

One wonders whether their real goal is to make it impossible to be a for-profit ISP (or even a non-profit ISP which is not taxpayer-subsidized).
If you need a cap, fine have one. Have one that is "fair" as you put it. Sorry $60 for 40 GB HA. Hardly fair. How can Comcast and Charter give out 250 GB caps and TW can only have 40 GB for the same money? If TW had the same 250 GB cap no one would have even harped on them over this near as much

$1 per GB overage? HA again. You know damn well that for every GB your customers go over it doesn't cost you near that to supply that extra bandwidth. So if having a cap is not about a money grab then have overage charges that are AT COST or hell even 50% over cost. Which means 20 cents per GB overage or less. So once again if TW had said "Ok 250 GB and 20 cents per GB overage" You'd hardly hear a thing from anyone.

It would also help if TW was HONEST about how much a GB is and not say "100,000 e-mails" or "10,000 photos"

How about saying it'a "6 hours of Youtube videos" or "3 hours of low quality Hulu watching" or "1 hour of HD streaming" or " 12 hours of online gaming" or "SD movie download = 2 GB" or "HD movie download = 6 GB" Put it in REAL terms people get. People get that if a HD download is 6 GB, then they can see how that fits into their cap.