Bandwidth caps have been a trending topic of discussion lately, I thought that I would share the bandwidth cap policies that we recently implemented at Vistabeam, along with some details on how we are enforcing it and how we established the caps.
Going back to day 1, we have had a 3gig cap on broadband customers with a $25/gig surcharge for anyone exceeding that amount. Fast forward six years, and that cap was so low as to be a joke – and we had not been enforcing it. It was also very difficult to collect accurate accounting data since we utilize access points from multiple vendors and did not want the overhead or additional configuration hassle of PPPoE or PPtP for all of our customers.
After looking at several different options for collecting the bandwidth traffic information, we decided to use open source tools to develop our own solution. We installed a switch between our core and edge routers and mirrored a port to our new collection server. Daily reports are mailed out to our techs list to show the customer who are nearing or over their caps. A customer page was created that shows the customers how much bandwidth they have used, how much they have left before charges and what their overage charges are (if any). The customer page also shows their historical usage trend for the last 12 months – starting with April 2010 when we started collecting the information. Starting on June 1, we will bill overages as a separate charge to the customers on the 1st of the month, regardless of their billing anniversary.
The process of implementing this was quite interesting. Out of 2000+ customers, 80 used more than 10 gigs for the month. One customer – a 1 meg subscriber at the far eastern edge of our network, behind seven wireless hops and on an 802.11b AP – downloaded 140gig. Another one, on the far western side of our network, downloaded 110gig. We called them and found out that they were watching a ton of online video. We discovered a county government connection that was around 100gig – mostly because someone in the sheriff’s department was pounding for BitTorrent files from 1am to 7am in the morning, and sometimes crashing their firewall machine because of the traffic. We also discovered that there was 80-100meg each day of stateless udp type traffic traversing our routed network and getting to our core router. Revised firewall rules on the APs fixed this problem. The majority of the rest of the subs on the list were either online video watchers, people with virus problems or non-power users who had mistakenly left filesharing programs running on their computers.
After reviewing the usage records, we decided on the following cap sizes for our plans:
Package Monthly Download Cap
384k 10 gigabytes
640k 10 gigabytes
1 meg 20 gigabytes
2 meg 40 gigabytes
3 meg 50 gigabytes
4 meg 60 gigabytes
8 meg 80 gigabytes
Additional capacity over cap $1 per gigabyte over the cap
I feel that these caps are more than generous, and should have a minimal effect on the majority of our customers. With our backbone consumption per customer increasing, implementing caps of some kind became a necessity. I am not looking at the caps as a new “profit center” – they are a deterrent as much as anything. It will provide an incentive for customers to upgrade to a faster plan with a higher cap, or take their download habits to a competitor and chew up someone else’s bandwidth.
This has been an educational experience, and probably one that we should have gone through a couple of years ago.
Have you had any customer backlash (e.g. angry customer response)? How did you let your existing customers know about the new caps? Have you had any issue with folks not understanding or not having a frame of reference for the caps?
Our 140gig customer was a little bit upset. Everyone else has been understanding and some were grateful for the notification. One of the important keys was to make sure that customers had a way to track their own usage along with what the costs would be. That helped a lot.
Have you had any customer backlash (e.g. angry customer response)? How did you let your existing customers know about the new caps? Have you had any issue with folks not understanding or not having a frame of reference for the caps?
One customer cancelled, specifically because of the caps. The customer that was our heaviest user has downgraded his Internet package and purchased a satellite television service to get his video. He had been streaming online video nearly 9 hours a day before. The satellite system is a much better way to watch video, especially when combined with a DVR.
We are putting the information about the caps on our customer newsletters, our website and on our invoices. So far, we have not had any problems explaining the frame of reference on the caps. We did build a very nice page where customers can check how much bandwidth they have used, how much they have left and what their overage charges are, if they have any. That has helped a lot.