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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Vonage Hits ISP Resistance
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Steve Sobol wrote: I'm replying to stuff on NANOG too much. I should stop...Bill Nash <[email protected]> wrote:Not proportional to the potential cost of providing the service.I find this to be entertaining, since as a VOIP consumer, I'm reimbursing my ISP for the cost of the traffic as part of my monthly tithe. That said: This is really a matter of adjusting business models as the costs of providing various types of services change. As others have pointed out, all end user telecommunications networks that I'm aware of are based on some amount of oversubscription. This is not necessarily in the sense that pipes are full and users are getting poor service, but that it's assumed the users won't all use it at once. When doing flat rate, unlimited use, billing, the goal is generally to set the price such that each user covers the cost of serving the average user. Assuming the prices aren't excessively high, the ISP or phone company (or all you can eat restaurant, for that matter) probably loses money on its heaviest users, does quite well on the users who barely use the service at all, and in the end it all balances out. But if the average user starts using the service more, the cost model breaks. At that point the ISP or phone company needs to either find a way to lower the cost of providing the service, discourage people from using it, or raise prices. This isn't unique to VOIP or PtP; it's a general issue with flat rate business models. Another approach is to bill based on usage, in which case if you're not losing money on every bit, you've got an incentive to encourage your customers to use your product more. Even there, you've got oversubscription issues to contend with: If you're billing your customers per minute, or per megabyte, you still need to hope that they're not all going to use the same minute, or all send their megabyte at the same time. If they are, the model breaks and needs to be fixed somehow. What I generally see as I look at this industry around the world, is that pricing models adapt to fit local conditions, and continue to adapt as those conditions change. In the US, broadband providers tend to do flat rate billing because it's easy to administer and it works. Colo providers tend to do usage based billing, because the spread between the cost of hosting somebody whose website gets occasional hits versus the cost of somebody who is constantly saturating a 100 Mb/s pipe is just too big. Elsewhere, things sometimes work differently. Suresh was saying earlier that Korea Telecom is switching to usage based billing for broadband, presumably because they hope that will be a better fit for their market than flat rate. In Nepal, New Zealand, and Western Australia, all places where long distance capacity is very expensive, I've seen pricing differentiation between local and long distance Internet use. In Nepal and Western Australia, it's been flat rate billing for local use, and per bit billing for long distance, while in New Zealand there's at least talk of providing New Zealand only connectivity. In the US that sounds horrendously complicated, but where the wholesale monthly cost of international bandwidth is $5,000 per Mb/s and the monthly cost of handing traffic off to other local ISPs at the local exchange point is around $50 per Mb/s (Kathmandu), it makes a lot of sense. So, I don't know if VOIP use will measurably change the costs of broadband providers in the US. If it's only a few users, I suspect it won't. If it's a lot of users, and there's big market demand for it, I suspect the ISPs that survive will find a working billing model. -Steve
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