 espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2
 ·Clear Wireless
| said by delltechkid:All of the indirect costs you mention would exist even if they didn't provide HSI, as they must have these for TV. Sure there are a few extra people that they might of had to hire to cover the people who buy only internet, but I'm sure the majority of their HSI customers probably have cable TV as well. There are a number of dual-purpose employees, which is why it's difficult to tie them to a specific product. Still, if you needed 40 FTE hours/week to serve a function specific to video that same person isn't going to be able to have more time dedicated to HSI. As workload increases you need more people, even if some of their duties may be shared.
The HSI call center support staff are different from the video support staff. There are still many data-only field service techs, and without the HSI product they wouldn't need the CMTS layout they have (and associated employees who manage that), they wouldn't need the abuse staff to deal with DMCA complaints, they wouldn't have as much to manage in terms of ARIN IP netblock allocations, DNS assignments, mail server operations, DNS/DHCP server operations, etc.
No matter how you look at it, direct costs of a specific service alone are a poor way of relating the total cost of providing that service to revenue. |
