Telecom Big Time plan trouble thread

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom Big Time plan trouble thread

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#298747 13-Feb-2010 22:46

tunafish: Nice words much less or no shaping, which one is it, that is like says trust me i am a salesman. Then next month it will be 3 am to 8 am and then 4 am to 7 am, Shaping will never work, all Telcom has done is suck people into a concept, and as long as the churn is within a range nothing will happen. I feel sorry for users who think this is what broadband is all about. In looking at the last Telecom financial report where there is no mention about Telecom's Epitero rating. The prevous financial report they where so proud of their number two rating, I guess they have gone down, way down.

The reason I don't say whether it's "No" or "much less" is that I don't know at the moment. It's not strictly my area.

I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but if someone values high performance whenever they want it, there are other plans offered by Telecom (and other ISPs) that are a better match than Bigtime.

If on the other hand, someone wants to be able to download (or upload) truly phenomenal amounts of data and never worry about overage, consider Bigtime. As an example, I have Bigtime here and I am currently backing up all my digital photos (I shoot sports, and in RAW!) to backblaze.com. I have about a terabyte of photos and Bigtime is wonderful. I also have multiple local backups, but I am paranoid!

I'm sure everyone understands that you simply can't have great performance, 24*7, AND low low price... You do get that?

There's also the option for people to try the flat rate, unlimited plans from other ISPs.

As for the Epitiro scores - Telecom does consistently very well in them. I don't know why the results haven't been reported by Telecom but when I last looked at the public results, the performance of most ISPs (with a couple of exceptions) were so close that the ranking at the top of the chart is pretty meaningless.

Out of interest, how would you solve the situation? Just bear in mind that NO COMPANY is going to offer a plan that costs more to provision than it brings in revenue, so dropping the price, or turning off (turning way down) the shaping won't work by themselves.

I know the product managers for Bigtime follow this forum, so any insightful suggestions will at least get seen by the people responsible for the plan portfolio.

Oh, and I am most definitely NOT a salesman.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

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#298753 13-Feb-2010 23:36

nitrotech: Big time just can't seem to get it together, I have to plug in my mobile bb data stick if I want to download even things like drivers yet torrents seem fine.

I can only seem to get about 5kb from places like hp on big time but I get 50-100kb on mobile BB.

Yep i understand the whole shaping thing but it seems that torrents are the only thing that works properly on bigtime but I thought that was the very thing they are trying to limit.

HP uses an FTP server for its driver downloads an bigtime shapes FTP.

tunafish

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#298798 14-Feb-2010 10:22

In response to Talkiet what would Tunafish do?
Get rid of Big time.
Have a new 100Gig for $80.00 per month
Allow another 100Gig for $20.00 per month
Allow a further 100Gig for $10.00 per month
Put in a huge P2P, streaming media and HTTP cache.
Shape just the encrypted P2P so users who get content from cache, get it fast.

Talkiet

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#298806 14-Feb-2010 10:38

tunafish: In response to Talkiet what would Tunafish do?
Get rid of Big time.
Have a new 100Gig for $80.00 per month
Allow another 100Gig for $20.00 per month
Allow a further 100Gig for $10.00 per month
Put in a huge P2P, streaming media and HTTP cache.
Shape just the encrypted P2P so users who get content from cache, get it fast.

Sorry, I don't think any of those dollar values would be economically viable... Not by a long shot.

The cache idea holds merit, but do you know what those things are worth? I have a rough idea, and you won't be getting much change from a million bucks (depending on the amount of bandwith you license!).

Simply wanting massive amounts of cap for very small $$$ won't change the economic background - I wish it would.

Remember, the proposed plans MUST make a profit for the company offering them, or else the business case doesn't work and the plans simply never get past the proposal stage.

Telecom's not alone in needing to make a profit. Any ISP will NEED to make a profit on a plan (or have a realistic expectation of doing so) before they offer it.

Thge "Loss Leader" argument (supermarket selling Coke for $0.89) doesn't make any sense here as the ultra heavy users typically spend almost nothing extra. I know there are exceptions to that rule, but forget about trying to use the loss leader argument - any plans offered for heavy users must stand on their own business case.

Creative thinking is what's needed... Looking at ideas to cache could easily be part of the overall plan, but simply reducing prices or increasing caps won't work by themselves, sorry.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

tunafish

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#298817 14-Feb-2010 11:21

Hello Talkiet; It took you 16 minutes to read my idea, think about it and then rubbish it. Basically if ISP's are not thinking about these volumes and planning to deliver these volume within 12 months something is fundamentally wrong. HD video alone from Youtube is going to be big, as for the HD movies, these have to be in the 4 to 6 Gig range each. What about FTTN or FTTH what is the point. I am sure we wont be having FTTx just to deliver 20Gig a month. I guess when you thing data sizes it is related to digital photos, small compared to video, but big in your world.

Talkiet

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#298822 14-Feb-2010 11:41

tunafish: Hello Talkiet; It took you 16 minutes to read my idea, think about it and then rubbish it. Basically if ISP's are not thinking about these volumes and planning to deliver these volume within 12 months something is fundamentally wrong. HD video alone from Youtube is going to be big, as for the HD movies, these have to be in the 4 to 6 Gig range each. What about FTTN or FTTH what is the point. I am sure we wont be having FTTx just to deliver 20Gig a month. I guess when you thing data sizes it is related to digital photos, small compared to video, but big in your world.

Hi there,... Sorry you feel I didn't consider your idea - I did... I have had a lot of experience with pricing and plans in the past and I'm afraid that I just know that 100GB for $80 doesn't work at this point in time. I don't have to go re-run the pricing to confirm that - it's just so far away from what's currently economical.

HD video is going to be big, you're absolutely right. Telecom currently has a Youtube cache in the network that (in the absence of physical layer issues) provides excellent performance, on Bigtime and the unshaped plans.

Tivo also offers a lot of material, and any downloads from Tivo are not metered, so don't count against your monthly allowance.

And please don't assume that because I am big into digital photography that I don't understands the needs of heavy internet users. I promise you that I do. In fact I have 2 internet connections at home - One is Bigtime (used for large non-urgent downloads and my online backup) and one other fullspeed ADSL line used for general browsing and for when I want stuff quickly.

Caps will go up over time for sure... The cost of international bandwidth is slowly coming down. But just because a HD movie is 4 - 20Gb doesn't mean that the data is any cheaper to get from overseas than 4 - 20Gb of anything else.

For some reason, a lot of internet users seem to think that the bandwidth they use is free to ISPs. It's not, it's a major cost contributor. Those costs need to be covered by the users.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

Cymro

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#298824 14-Feb-2010 11:43

tunafish: In response to Talkiet what would Tunafish do?
Get rid of Big time.
Have a new 100Gig for $80.00 per month
Allow another 100Gig for $20.00 per month
Allow a further 100Gig for $10.00 per month
Put in a huge P2P, streaming media and HTTP cache.
Shape just the encrypted P2P so users who get content from cache, get it fast.

How many users do you think really need/want 100GB plans?

And I'd like to see the justification for such high data usage, beyond people with a need to move large amounts of data (GFX design/Photography) around every month.

Take away "Linux iso" downloading and the actual demand for data goes way down, until we get more IPTV solutions and commercial streaming media.

Talkiet

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#298825 14-Feb-2010 11:45

tunafish: [snip]What about FTTN or FTTH what is the point. I am sure we wont be having FTTx just to deliver 20Gig a month.

And this is worth commenting on by itself...

You're right - there's a massive focus on FTTx but a huge willingness from almost all parties to ignore the fact that the ultra fast access network doesn't mean that INTERNATIONAL traffic will be any faster.

FTTx will improve on-net performance a lot (think Tivo, cached material etc) and probably improve national website performance a bit, but the bottleneck for international internet performance is almost never the last mile access technology...

It's a combination of how much bandwidth is provisioned, latency, packet loss and TCP settings. Fibre will improve latency a tiny amount, but won't affect the major contributors.

Oh and please, judge the content of my posts, not how fast I manage to think and type.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

tunafish

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#298827 14-Feb-2010 11:57

I agree it is the International that is the problem, bring on Kordia, an alternative to Southern Cross, competition is good, thats step 1, step 2 how about a big CDN or a generic cache, interesting that Orcon who is owned by Kordia has not only thought about a CDN but how has a Peerapp up and running.

Ragnor

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#298854 14-Feb-2010 14:41

International transit prices are not the only problem, besides year on year they have been decreasing significantly.

It's convenient to ignore things like the cost of staff (which only ever goes up), cost of equipment (enterprise routers, shapers, caches run in the hundreds of thousands).

Also national bandwidth/transit and ADSL port costs are just as much a factor as international transit prices in the current pricing of plans.

You will find by far the vast majority of internet users are using <10GB per month in NZ.

Ragnor

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#298855 14-Feb-2010 14:45

tunafish: I agree it is the International that is the problem, bring on Kordia, an alternative to Southern Cross, competition is good, thats step 1, step 2 how about a big CDN or a generic cache, interesting that Orcon who is owned by Kordia has not only thought about a CDN but how has a Peerapp up and running.

Orcon made big losses in the last two years due to heavy investment required in their LLU roll out.
Orcon are not offering an unlimited plan.
Last year Orcon had to increase it's pricing quite a lot.

tunafish

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#298870 14-Feb-2010 15:32

The smaller ISP's like Orcon have to try harder for their customer base and at the same time make a profit. The smaller guys will never have the marketing budgets like Telecom let alone the ability to pay penalties for the stuff ups, so they look for ways to save on costs, and international is a very big cost. But for Telecom who has a "separate" company that is wholesale it is financially a death blow to the profitability of Telecom International to have a cache in Xtra, as today Xtra pays international and the money stays in the family, should that money go to a technology supplier of caching the money leaves the family, and then if caching is as efficient as it is marketing the revenue over many years will possibly never be made up. What if there was never competition to Telecom where would we be.

Talkiet

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#298881 14-Feb-2010 16:32

tunafish: The smaller ISP's like Orcon have to try harder for their customer base and at the same time make a profit. The smaller guys will never have the marketing budgets like Telecom let alone the ability to pay penalties for the stuff ups, so they look for ways to save on costs, and international is a very big cost. But for Telecom who has a "separate" company that is wholesale it is financially a death blow to the profitability of Telecom International to have a cache in Xtra, as today Xtra pays international and the money stays in the family, should that money go to a technology supplier of caching the money leaves the family, and then if caching is as efficient as it is marketing the revenue over many years will possibly never be made up. What if there was never competition to Telecom where would we be.

I'm afraid you're enturing into some pretty inaccurate speculation here...

Telecom Retail does use caching. And what's more, Telecom Retail makes business decisions based on what's best for Telecom Retail not Telecom Wholesale.

The other inaccuracy is believing that caching appliances / solutions are as assurate as their marketing. I have yet to see a case where real world caching benefits match the claims of those selling them. This happens in every part of life though... Fuel consumption figures, benefits from a diet (lose 10lb in 2 weeks guaranteed!") etc.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

freitasm

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#298884 14-Feb-2010 17:06

tunafish: But for Telecom who has a "separate" company that is wholesale it is financially a death blow to the profitability of Telecom International to have a cache in Xtra, as today Xtra pays international and the money stays in the family, should that money go to a technology supplier of caching the money leaves the family, and then if caching is as efficient as it is marketing the revenue over many years will possibly never be made up.

If Telecom Retail does anything like you are suggesting here then they would be breaching the Separation Undertaking Rules of Conduct and that would be seriously harmful to the company.

You better have very good evidence something like this ever happen/s/ed because that would blow Telecom New Zealand out of the market.

So think again: do you know what you are talking about?

System

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#298894 14-Feb-2010 18:14

freitasm:
tunafish: But for Telecom who has a "separate" company that is wholesale it is financially a death blow to the profitability of Telecom International to have a cache in Xtra, as today Xtra pays international and the money stays in the family, should that money go to a technology supplier of caching the money leaves the family, and then if caching is as efficient as it is marketing the revenue over many years will possibly never be made up.

do you know what you are talking about?

i was thinking the same thing

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