North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Lessons from the AU model

  • From: Alastair Johnson
  • Date: Tue Jan 22 05:13:20 2008


Mark Newton wrote:


Despite the best efforts of some people to run their broadband
access at line rate, residential broadband is very much a
"CIR + burst" kind of service.  All of our customers can burst
to line rate (they're paying for it, so they should be able to
get it).  None of our customers can burst at line rate 24x7 for
a month without paying for it.  You can work out the CIR by
dividing the number of bits in the quota by the number of
seconds in a month.

Indeed. If you look at New Zealand, a very similar economic model to
Australia (except less population and a much bigger density problem),
there are regulated wholesale products[1,2,3] that offer a 32Kbps CIR per subscriber, and linerate PIR.


32Kbps working out to approximately 10GB per month, you can guess what
the most common subscriber data cap is - and surprisingly few actually
exceed it, although it has definitely gone up.  Incidentally, the
incumbent in NZ launched a flat rate DSL package.  It did not go well,
and ultimately cost them several million dollars in subscriber refunds.

Perhaps some of the guys posting on this thread (Mark? MMC?) would be able to provide an average subscriber bandwidth (in GB or Kbit/s) use of their subscriber base. Break it down by <10G, >40G type accounts?

aj

[1] http://www.comcom.govt.nz/IndustryRegulation/Telecommunications/Wholesale/Overview.aspx for what the regulator is doing
[2] http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,205743-204225,00.html?nv=tpd
[3] http://www.telecom.co.nz/content/0,8748,204215-204225,00.html?nv=sd