Hayai Broadband Lite

[mgcarley]

As you can imagine, I spend a lot of my waking hours planning and thinking about every aspect of Hayai that one could possibly imagine. If I'm not doing that, I'm probably researching about equipment, network models, bandwidth optimization, reading the manuals and tech specs of equipment from all different vendors.Anyway, the subject of today's post is that I'm thinking about offering a kind of "Hayai lite" plan. Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. FUP ~25GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs999. Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. FUP ~50GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs1399. Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. FUP ~100GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs2099. More than that then we start venturing in to our true flat-rate plans.Clearly these are not aimed towards downloaders, but probably more designed to "compete" or at least compare with Airtel, Beam, BSNL, Tikona etc various FUP plans.I don't really like the idea of anyone using 256kbit/s ever, but it would be for those who want the piece of mind of a fixed price and no topups required, but the internet stays on etc etc etc... light users.Like I said: just a thought. Yes? No? Maybe? Comments?

 

[svagyan]

The degraded speed is too low. It should be 768kbps, or at worst, 512. 256 kbps is unusable for most multimedia applications.

 

[gaurang08]

I know this has been discussed over and over again in this forum, but a 2mbps truly unlimited connection(without FUP) @1300-1500/- pm would help you to win over loads of faithful customers.

And about these plans, I feel for the 'light' users, these plans are a bit over priced. In India, the average broadband expenditure for a family is Rs. 700-800/- maximum. So, the ones termed as light users will be comfortable spending just about Rs. 500 pm max.

Ps:- This is entirely my personal opinion and am open for corrections/discussions.

i agree with you .. i too would like to see 2mbps unlimited @ 1500/- sorts .. however the lite plans are also good and 100GB is a lot of data but after that too be cut off too 256kbps is not so good .. it should be more like 1mbps if 100 GB is exceeded ....

 

[stirredo]

As you can imagine, I spend a lot of my waking hours planning and thinking about every aspect of Hayai that one could possibly imagine. If I'm not doing that, I'm probably researching about equipment, network models, bandwidth optimization, reading the manuals and tech specs of equipment from all different vendors.

Anyway, the subject of today's post is that I'm thinking about offering a kind of "Hayai lite" plan.

Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. Fair Usage Policy ~25GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs999.
Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. Fair Usage Policy ~50GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs1399.
Flat-rate, 5 or 10... or even 100mbit/s. Fair Usage Policy ~100GB. Speed reduction to ~256kbit/s. Rs2099.

More than that then we start venturing in to our true flat-rate plans.

Clearly these are not aimed towards downloaders, but probably more designed to "compete" or at least compare with Airtel, Beam, BSNL, Tikona etc various Fair Usage Policy plans.

I don't really like the idea of anyone using 256kbit/s ever, but it would be for those who want the piece of mind of a fixed price and no topups required, but the internet stays on etc etc etc... light users.

Like I said: just a thought. Yes? No? Maybe? Comments?

While this is definitely suitable for "lite" users, I am not sure people who are paying atleast Rs. 999 will be light users. All lite users you will find are people having tariff plans below 600 Rs with other ISPs. Whoever is paying more than that is someone interested in downloading movies all night.

Instead of creating such lite plans, can you just add a 320kbps/512kbps connection after you are done with the current data plans limit. Ofcourse you wouldn't call them data plans anymore.

Will that be feasible for you? Hell if you create such plan even I can think of affording you.

 

[mgcarley]

Like I said, just thoughts.

If the new pricing negotiations on the wholesale side come through, the pricing can be made better. For now though, off the top of my head, at our pricing, Rs1500 allows just about Rs60GB/user (as an average monthly usage) before the user starts costing more than the revenue he brings in. MTNL et al get a lot better pricing than we do, so they probably can allow about 100-150GB per user on average because their copper infrastructure is long paid for.

I think you guys are still looking at it from the PoV of people who want to do a lot of downloading (BitTorrent, RS etc) which these plans are *not* aimed at - ideally the user would never hit the FUP but point of these plans is that if they do cross over 50GB or so, the internet should still continue to work - kind of half way between our data plans (6GB @ 100Mbit/s) and our 5Mbit/s flat-rate plans, which start at Rs2499+ST.

As for our other plans, I'm just in the middle of updating our price sheets in hopes that they're easier to read. The current one is at Powered by Google Docs

---------- Post added at 12:18 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:14 AM ----------

While this is definitely suitable for "lite" users, I am not sure people who are paying atleast Rs. 999 will be light users. All lite users you will find are people having tariff plans below 600 Rs with other ISPs. Whoever is paying more than that is someone interested in downloading movies all night.

Instead of creating such lite plans, can you just add a 320kbps/512kbps connection after you are done with the current data plans limit. Ofcourse you wouldn't call them data plans anymore.

Will that be feasible for you? Hell if you create such plan even I can think of affording you.

Unfortunately, as of now if we made our data plans essentially unlimited, we'd go bankrupt very quickly.

However...

If we can get the price of our new infrastructure and per-GB average cost down by about 50%, we can look at it.

 

[Sushubh]

this is a fact that the light users like uncles and aunts who use internet rarely at home would not pay as much as 1000 bucks a month no matter what the benefits are. my fufa ji has the airtel 256kbps UL account. same is the case with my neighbor uncle. both have very limited usage of internet (checking emails once in a while). but the money they spend for it is too high for what they do with the connection. for them a plan where they are charged as per their usage would be a better plan (prepaid). especially with easy access to usage.

 

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[mgcarley]

this is a fact that the light users like uncles and aunts who use internet rarely at home would not pay as much as 1000 bucks a month no matter what the benefits are.

my fufa ji has the airtel 256kbps Unlimited account. same is the case with my neighbor uncle. both have very limited usage of internet (checking emails once in a while). but the money they spend for it is too high for what they do with the connection.

for them a plan where they are charged as per their usage would be a better plan (prepaid). especially with easy access to usage.

Point taken. So these plans are pretty rubbish and I don't have to mull on them any more until such time as we can feasibly make them more affordable? (25-50% cheaper)

---------- Post added at 12:35 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:31 AM ----------

I guess it proves the point that all FUP plans in India are *way* overpriced - Airtel has a 30GB for 1999... granted the speed reduction is not all the way down to 256kbit/s, but still

 

[Sushubh]

well if you want to cater to the masses... you would have to take some other route. i cannot think of anything innovative... but you might find yourself dealing with customers who might not use more than 5GB a month on their connection. essentially, you need to find a way where you can recover the expense of providing the connection because the charges for bandwidth are going to be minimal.

---------- Post added at 12:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:40 AM ----------

the prices you are talking about 999 per month... they better not include the separate monthly charges because that makes it even more expensive

 

[mgcarley]

I mean, at the end of the day, it would probably be a rare exception whereby anyone would use more than 25-50GB *unless* they are doing a fair amount of downloading... That's between 1 and 2GB per day on average. What kind of email checking requires that much *really*. I think you'd probably also find it relatively difficult to stream that much from Youtube unless you're watching in HQ (not impossible, but the average aaji doesn't spend 3+ hours a day on Youtube).

---------- Post added at 12:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:43 AM ----------

well if you want to cater to the masses... you would have to take some other route. i cannot think of anything innovative... but you might find yourself dealing with customers who might not use more than 5GB a month on their connection. essentially, you need to find a way where you can recover the expense of providing the connection because the charges for bandwidth are going to be minimal.

If they're only using ~5GB a month, then they can surely use the 6GB data plan @ Rs647 inc tax.

the prices you are talking about 999 per month... they better not include the separate monthly charges because that makes it even more expensive

No, I'm talking all inclusive.

 

[Sushubh]

look at it this way. take a budget of 500 bucks. now decide what exactly you can provide in this while remaining profitable. margins are going to be low but a lot of low usage customers can become high usage customers are people start using more online services. and then market this plan for this segment of the market. a flat 500 rupee plan is better than 699 plus taxes. for simplicity sake have one plan with low speeds for this section of the customer base. you might have to make this plan a very low profit margin plan or maybe even offer it at cost pricing.