> I'm paying them £29.99/ month for an uncapped one meg service which
> clearly
> isn't really an uncapped service at all. My usage over the last 3 months
> has
> been 40, 52 and 31 GB/month, so I'm hoping that I'm not going to be
> capped
> or pushed onto a slow pipe, but I wouldn't trust PlusNet in this capacity.
And why not? The following email just arrived from Plus that spells out the
reality in great detail.
"There has been some speculation surrounding PlusNet's management of
its broadband network and its response to customers utilising the
service significantly beyond its design. The following information is
provided to bring clarity to the situation.
It is important to understand that the wholesale cost for Broadband is
made up of 8.40 (ex VAT) per month per customer for the local loop
component and 31,130 (ex VAT) per month per 155Mb segment of a 622Mb
central pipe (BT broadband network transit). Depending on customer mix
and product mix, typically between 4000 and 10000 customers may be
serviced per segment. The resulting costs per customer are common to
all ISPs.
In order to frame the discussion further, industry average for
Broadband utilisation is circa 7GB per month per customer, across all
speeds, ISPs and account types.
PlusNet, Pipex, Zen, Nildram, Eclipse etc. all have to offer a better
all round service than BT, Wanadoo, AOL and Tiscali and in most cases
are also offered at a lower price. When looking at PlusNet's products
specifically, Broadband Home Premier 512k at 21.99 (inc VAT) is a
fixed cost service without a data transfer cap and with a contention
ratio of 50:1 (up to 50 users sharing 1 unit of capacity).
It is worth bearing in mind that, due to the nature of variable usage
across a customer base, there is always going to be scope for bursts
of utilisation by individual customers in any given month. The issue
is when users consistently use significantly greater resource than the
product can support.
Considering all of the information above, we have budgeted for the
average usage on Home Premier 512k to be up to 10GB per month. This
budget is based on the current wholesale structure and pricing.
However, there are many legitimate activities which can push people to
using more than this per month, and so we have taken that into account
in building the overall platform capacity.
It becomes very clear, if you put all the information together, that
no ISP can sell sustainable Broadband for less than 30 inc. VAT per
month and support users that continuously use in excess of 50GB per
month in the current wholesale environment. By the end of 2005 every
ISP will either be leveraging LLU, DataStream, UBC or CBC to provide
Broadband services. Indeed, over the last 2 years, a number of ISPs
have already started to deal with customers who have unsustainable
usage, some covertly but others not so, including Wanadoo and Virgin.
Having established that specific customers were using the service
significantly beyond its design, we identified that this issue was
threatening the sustainability of the service for all customers.
Specifically we have established a model that delivers an above
average service for a below average price. However, this model cannot
reasonably support customers consistently using an average of 50 times
the service design.
At this point we looked at what other providers were doing in relation
to this issue. We didn't feel that the approaches already taken were
appropriate for our customers. They either went against our open and
honest policy when interacting with customers, or did not enable an
above average service to be delivered at a below average price for all
customers.
We engaged the PlusNet UserGroup (
http://usergroup.plus.net) to
discuss potential methods of managing the very small percentage of
users undermining the quality of service available to the rest of the
customers at the price point being offered. Following this
consultation, actions were decided and taken. The intent was to ensure
the fixed cost Unmetered Broadband proposition was maintained. The
intent was also to avoid the implementation of data transfer caps,
which would affect all of our customers.
The action taken was also designed to make other customers with usage
patterns closest to the 0.3% (who may not have been directly impacted
by the current process) also consider their usage levels.
The specific action was to request that 0.3% of all broadband
customers moderated their usage.
Their level of usage was inordinately high, resulting in an impact on
the quality of service for all. This 0.3% of customers were using
approximately 10% of the available platform. This equated to data
transfer levels that were consistently between 140GB per month and
600GB per month.
The objective of this exercise was to protect 99.7% of the customer
base from adverse effects resulting from the usage of the 0.3%.
Natural outcomes of this exercise were identified as:
a) A voluntary change in usage by the 0.3% of customers
b) Implementation of a solution to manage the overall capacity
available to these customers
c) Customers who didn't accept either a) or b) moving to another provider
As a result of yesterday's implementation, 8% of our total capacity
has already been freed up for the majority of our customers and a
performance improvement has been experienced by nearly all of our
customers as a result. 0.2% of customers were initially given 2% of
our overall capacity. Given the usage patterns of these customers, it
follows that their own broadband experience is being impacted by each
other's usage. For the first time this usage has not impacted the vast
majority of customers.
We are committed to providing a high quality of service at a great
price, and we will always take steps, to maintain this for our entire
customer base. We hope that the measures that are currently in place
will be successful; however there are a number of further options
available which can be explored. These could include:
+ Reduction in per-customer performance when individual usage goes
beyond a certain level e.g. 100GB for a 512k service
+ The introduction of charges for usage beyond a certain level e.g.
100GB for a 512k service
Any such additional measures would only be aimed at consistent
unsustainable usage patterns, and would be undertaken following
consultation & communication with our customers.
As a result of feedback received we are now looking to implement
flexibility on the managed platform to facilitate access to the full
potential of the network in non busy periods
While not everyone was going to be entirely happy with the events of
the past few weeks as there was never going to be a magic solution for
this problem. We have taken an approach that benefits the vast
majority of our customers, short and long term.
Regards,
Ian Wild
PlusNet Customer Support"
Can you name another ISP that would have taken the same open approach?
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