Spark's overuse charges for business broadband clients

BlinkyBill:
Dynamic:

BlinkyBill: How on earth can Spark possibly track or monitor excess use of bandwidth? Very interested to understand this. Remember, this is business use, not consumer use.

Spark themselves indicate monitoring of excess usage is easy. Evidence here: http://www.spark.co.nz/help/internet-email/manage-internet-data/check-broadband-usage/going-over-spark-broadband-allowance/ This is Spark fulfilling their duty of care to their non-business clients to limit a financial loss if internet usage is unexpectedly high.

Why would Spark not protect their business clients in the same way? Can you think of a business or industry that would rather have the unexpectedly large bill?

Business use is predicated on achieving a Service Level. For business use, Spark deliver throughput and capacity to the agreed SLA. That is a characteristic of business use. Businesses don't want their business operations to be affected by throttled internet.

Consumers aren't impacted in terms of revenue or service to THEIR customers if throttling occurs, because they don't have any. Consumer use and business use are completely different use-cases.

It is reasonable to expect a business to manage the resources they use to operate their business. Use of the internet is ubiquitous for just about any business; at the lowest end for emails twice a day, and at the high end for distributing video on demand to millions of consumers.that same standard cannot reasonably be applied to consumer use, hence fair-use policies, throttling etc.

And Spark do provide alert notifications for businesses.

Yes the charge is excessive; but high fees for bad management practices serves to concentrate the mind. I myself apply high fees to provide services I don't really want to provide.

blinky - You are soooo funny: "For business use, Spark deliver throughput and capacity to the agreed SLA"

Every time we have a business client with issues we get crap support and no extra anything to resolve the issues. what's more the business support services close and are not around if the poo flies during the weekend. However the cheap home support is always there. And don't get me started on the times we used to have to get corporate support from (ex) Genii.

SLas are a figment of the advertising departments imagination designed to justify screwing business users for more than home users while doing sweet very nothing about providing any SLA. If my internet goes down as a business Spark gives the "best effort" speech. ISP SLA's live in the same dream space as the tooth fairy and santa claus.

Iand jsut to show I am not jsut dissing Spark - Hey vodafone - how were your SLAs for business users on your cable? Not very good were they.

As a side note - whoever installed or ran the software or the software providers themselves - should possibly have some liability in this case. THe business got the software and expected it to work in faith. if my car's brakes fail as the electronics die owing to factory malfeasence, then the car manufacturer is liable. Ditto software / installers surely?

I had a case where a large chain of computer geeks / nerds installed a backup for a (now my) client. 300GB harddrvie, with 100Gb of dat abacking up daily. Simpe maths tells you it dies in 3 days but they accepted no liability for the cruddy setup even though it cost thousands to restore he dead hard drive a few months later as backups had failed on day 3. The courts saw differently. There is an expectation of reasonable service, competence and levels of expected functionality involved here. Why no discussionon that? it's not Sparks fault, it isprobably not the businesses fault - they did due diligence and setup off site backups, but as for the installer anda manufacturer of software ... surely they bear / bare some blame?

hio77

nunz