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DaDawgs
Premium Member
join:2010-08-02
Deltaville, VA

DaDawgs to jcremin

Premium Member

to jcremin

Re: Any stats for bandwidth usage at various speeds?

said by jcremin:

Has anyone seen any stats or reports (or could possibly generate any) showing the average data consumption by customers at various speeds? I want to start playing around with offering faster plans, but I'm taking baby steps because my wholesale cost is still high enough that I don't want to bump up my plans and end up chewing up my entire profit margin. I'm really curious about how many gigs/mo the typical customer uses at speeds like 1, 3, 5, and 10 megs.

In my experience, it is more about the user than the bandwidth available. For example when we were strictly a dial-up ISP and we had a hundred or so lines we had plenty of bandwidth and so we ignored customer stats. One day I decided to run some scripts on the PPP logs. Low and Behold! We had this one user who had used almost 50% of the total bandwidth that our customers had used in the last six months! Wow.

I sniffed the traffic. It was some teenage girl who was running streaming audio 24x7. We left her alone because we had more bandwidth than we could sell.

Later when we started offering more bandwidth I started running a monthly job that processed the PPPoE logs and spit out reports about what users were using. It did not matter how fast the user could go. It was about the user.

Bottom line, in any broadband environment 5% or 10% of your users will use 50% of your bandwidth, unless you shape them down. What we did was get that usage report on the 15th and call the really egregious ones. You know the type. They start a movie download when they leave the house in the morning but just to make sure it runs through they start two more copies... That kind.

You just call them and explain to them that you are locking them down to 256x256 for a week or you will refund the rest of their contract and they can go to your competition... because you *REALLY* don't want the guy that downloads 200 gigs a month on your network anyway... I would much rather he went to the competition.

The other option is progressive billing by usage... That is a hard one to sell. I don't really understand why. You pay for water by the pint at 7-11 but users think if you are not doing "flat rate" and "unlimited" you are screwing them...