On 5/11/14 11:43, Dean Pemberton wrote:
I remember this problem from back in the TelstraClear Cable days.
Home businesses could get much faster/cheaper connections if they signed up for TCL Cable than for ADSL. They didn't like at all being told they didn't have any SLA when things went down.
And so there were such things as TCL Cable business connections (at least at one point; I had a customer that had one of them). I suspect about the only difference was the SLA. In many other areas of IT you can pay more for a SLA with faster restore (eg, hardware repairs), and it's often sold as a separate line item. I don't see a reason why that couldn't happen with Internet service too -- one has to prioritise dispatch of service people somehow. Some people may want 4-hour-restore for their house; some businesses might not care providing someone comes next week. In an Internet context both CIR and contention ratios seem obvious other things an organisation/person might legitimately choose to pay more for, in various unbundled ways. A home user might, eg, choose to live with a CIR that was just enough for, say, one TV stream (or might not, if they have children :-) ), but a business might want a larger CIR. It seems to me this too could be sold as a separate line item, with necessarily having to be tagged "home" or "business". (Although explaining CIR and just how far the CIR extended might become... non-trivial.) IMHO there's definitely room in the middle between "no CIR, capped bandwidth usage, faster burst" ("home") and "full CIR, no bandwidth cap, faster burst" ("business") for other variations. But it may well take a while to "educate the market" on what they're buying. It might also help _not_ to call them "home plans" and "business plans". At some point for many users several of these criteria become "practically unlimited" -- ie, so far beyond what they'll actually use -- that more ceases to be a selling point, so the buying distinguisher is something else other than, eg, "faster burst rate". Certainly for me beyond, say, 100Mbps to my house I care about most things other than the peak burst rate (and I only care about peak burst rate beyond 10Mbps occasionally even now). Ewen