mgcarley
Founder, Hayai Broadband
Amen 
So far as I am able to understand, hayaii is trying to seriously raise the standards of Indian "Internet" to the international standards.
I moved to India from Finland. That should give you some idea of what we want to achieve.
And it's quite cool. And no Dadagiri, if a person is abusing the resources constantly, you will ask him to find an alternative provider. One thing am confused about is, are you really going to offer unlimited or I guess it's more wise to say 'un-metered' bandwidth to users? Actually it's quite confusing to read all 12 pages of this thread and the 'How it all began', thread >.< BTW, around when is it going to launch in Delhi?
In my opinion, the usage of the word "unlimited" is a farce. Nothing is unlimited - and if you think it is, just look at the speeds you get: THAT is how they limit your usage.
Call me OCD or anal-retentive, but I've chosen to use the term flat-rate for our plans, as I believe it is more accurate (as it refers to pricing), and it gives us some leeway in that, if we absolutely have to, we can do something to curb someones usage in order to keep everyone an A-1, mind blasting experience using our service.
I was thinking about the "unlimited tripe" on behalf. Maybe it is a bad experience from BSNL's service (256 kbps with 1GB cap) which drove me mad enough. But then we persisted and the the "unlimited plan" was introduced
It has "spoilt and biased" my thinking since then
One way out of this mess could be in a simpler way is to charge (or meter) the limits during the fixed times. For example, the mobile companies offer the "unlimited talk time" for night hours because it keeps their "investments" utilized (and earning some more revenue in the process) which otherwise would be idling. They have some fancy metric for that; this eludes me. Similarly, like in other countries, you end up paying the differential rates for electricity during off peak or on peak hours. This "probably" helps the companies to realize the higher value of the product (including factoring in transmission losses etc.).
How is that simpler? I can only imagine what hell their billing systems must be! No wonder some of the top complaints against phone/mobile providers and ISPs are all about billing! We want to avoid billing issues as much as humanly possible.
Of course, this doesn't mean we're not going to have things like night-unlimited (in fact, I've even introduced this for Hayai NZ as well, though not many people "get it" here - NU is a phenomenon I've only ever seen in India).
I am not an expert in this but slowly you'd be able to get a clearer picture of the maximum demand on your network, the expected redundancy etc. etc. And if a moron is abusing the network DURING that time, he pays more (over and above his "usage as allowed by the existing plan"). Of course, this has to be reflected on the web site or by some other means i.e. the time when a person is liable to be charged more.
I know that this liable to be misinterpreted because unfortunately a clear line of communication does not work.
I think this relates to the NU concept - while we will have such plans, I think the easiest way (rather than charging people for GBs over-and-above what their plan allows) is to just turn them off completely if they cross that threshold - they can find out why it doesn't work during these hours by calling us or perhaps a DNS redirect of some sort will happen to alert the user that they have exceeded their limit for day usage and that they can either buy more data or wait for their internet to return at 8pm or 9pm or whatever the timings are.
On the other hand, to be very honest with you, even I don't know how much I would end up using. Let me propose an alternative way out. Assuming that the networks to start with are offered "unlimited" for say a trial period of about 3-6 months. This is good enough to give an indication of usage patterns and then tiered pricing can then be introduced. Just a suggestion. In any case, you would be offering 30-50 GB with the "lite plan" as mentioned; assuming that most of the rational users would hardly cross these limits.
Most people don't. But in all seriousness, 95% or more of people who aren't - let's face it - committing piracy - are unlikely to use more than 1GB per day.
This is partially why, for our lite plans, to be safe rather than sorry, we are offering more GBs than people are likely to use (again, we give people a sample usage pattern and we can determine the best plan based on that). In theory, if a subscriber uses every single GB on the lite plans, we'll make almost nothing on that subscriber: because these plans (as I have mentioned countless times) are not aimed at people who download a lot, but people currently on plans such as the data plans offered by BSNL and MTNL - 599 for 2.5GB usage.
The usage profile of such a subscriber might be like your parents (or my parents) who currently live inside these 2.5GB quotas, and *have* been stung once or twice by an extra 500MB of usage, but use the net to communicate with their children in other cities/countries via Skype Video, download/compose a few emails & attachments, browsing websites, flickr/picasa albums, facebook, maybe even some youtube stuff, but even after all that, they would probably hit maybe 70% of the quota if they're lucky... and on these plans, for now our margin is in those unused GBs.
My contention is that as a user, I don't want to calculate the byte going in and out. It goes for most of the customers too. At the same time, with a planned offering of say 30-50 GB I find it awkward to "monitor" the usage.
I agree. This is where our sales technique comes in: we can determine approximate usage based on how you think you'll use the net.
On a standard data plan, if it's too much, doesn't matter: data rolls over. If it's not enough, you know to buy more next time (and if that's too much, then it'll roll over again).
If it's a lite-plan, just upgrade or downgrade the plan as necessary - but my argument remains: if you're using over 30GB per month, you're probably not a lite user and the lite service probably isn't suitable for you.
Even then for those users who do use BitTorrent on a data (or lite) plan, uTorrent does have a monthly usage limit option, just in case.
I cannot claim for the outliers who would abuse the system in any case but then you have already outlined the safeguards accordingly.
I admit it is a tricky situation but there can never be a single unified answer.
Agreed. Nothing will suit everybody 100% perfectly, but there are only so many options we can give: the best we can do is come up with the best combination of options to suit as much of the subscriber base as possible.
I guess you missed my point. Your analogies are not appropriate apart from cable TV to an extent. There is no worthwhile pre-existing alternative to any of those services you mention.
On the other hand, with cloud computing, we are telling the customer that he need not have a high-end machine or a lot of expensive software at home. Instead he has a low end machine with a very good internet connection and uses it as a window to the cloud. That argument holds only if people are actually paying expensive prices for the software they use. In other economies, a typical home user would end up spending far more on software than he has on the hardware. Not so in India.
Hope you understand why I am saying cloud computing catching on is not imminent in India. Just my 2 cents.
There also hasn't been a very good platform for cloud computing in India so far. I think if users can have a basic machine which boots up in a couple of seconds (maybe via PXE boot ROM), and has maybe an SD-card slot and a suitable OS, then a cheap (maybe Rs5k) device might do the trick: especially for the lite-users and even more so for rural users.
I personally believe that Mathew's idea of a kind of soft limit which will not trigger action in just one month of minor abuse solves your problem. And he also has the provision to buy more data capacity in a kind of prepaid service. I think that is reasonable.
To expect that you would never need to be bothered about exceeding your bill, that is what FUP (with speed throttling) is all about and that is something that Mathew swears he will not do because he feels ashamed of calling 256 kbps broadband.
I do share your fear of a shocking bill at the end of the month but then again, aren't we susceptible to high electricity or telephone bills for overuse because there is no hard cap?
Also AFAIK, Mathew's plans are all prepaid so that takes care of the bill shock
1. Yes.
2. 256kbit/s still better than what we get throttled to in NZ (64k!)... but you're right, 256k sucks.
3. Finally... someone who gets it.
4. Not all - we can do the flat-rate plans on a postpaid basis, but I think for the purpose of buying data, it's easier for both us and for you if you buy what you think you'll need and then just recharge as you need it, otherwise there isn't an easy way to prevent bill shock if it's billed after the fact.
So far as I am able to understand, hayaii is trying to seriously raise the standards of Indian "Internet" to the international standards.
I moved to India from Finland. That should give you some idea of what we want to achieve.
And it's quite cool. And no Dadagiri, if a person is abusing the resources constantly, you will ask him to find an alternative provider. One thing am confused about is, are you really going to offer unlimited or I guess it's more wise to say 'un-metered' bandwidth to users? Actually it's quite confusing to read all 12 pages of this thread and the 'How it all began', thread >.< BTW, around when is it going to launch in Delhi?
In my opinion, the usage of the word "unlimited" is a farce. Nothing is unlimited - and if you think it is, just look at the speeds you get: THAT is how they limit your usage.
Call me OCD or anal-retentive, but I've chosen to use the term flat-rate for our plans, as I believe it is more accurate (as it refers to pricing), and it gives us some leeway in that, if we absolutely have to, we can do something to curb someones usage in order to keep everyone an A-1, mind blasting experience using our service.
I was thinking about the "unlimited tripe" on behalf. Maybe it is a bad experience from BSNL's service (256 kbps with 1GB cap) which drove me mad enough. But then we persisted and the the "unlimited plan" was introduced
It has "spoilt and biased" my thinking since then One way out of this mess could be in a simpler way is to charge (or meter) the limits during the fixed times. For example, the mobile companies offer the "unlimited talk time" for night hours because it keeps their "investments" utilized (and earning some more revenue in the process) which otherwise would be idling. They have some fancy metric for that; this eludes me. Similarly, like in other countries, you end up paying the differential rates for electricity during off peak or on peak hours. This "probably" helps the companies to realize the higher value of the product (including factoring in transmission losses etc.).
How is that simpler? I can only imagine what hell their billing systems must be! No wonder some of the top complaints against phone/mobile providers and ISPs are all about billing! We want to avoid billing issues as much as humanly possible.
Of course, this doesn't mean we're not going to have things like night-unlimited (in fact, I've even introduced this for Hayai NZ as well, though not many people "get it" here - NU is a phenomenon I've only ever seen in India).
I am not an expert in this but slowly you'd be able to get a clearer picture of the maximum demand on your network, the expected redundancy etc. etc. And if a moron is abusing the network DURING that time, he pays more (over and above his "usage as allowed by the existing plan"). Of course, this has to be reflected on the web site or by some other means i.e. the time when a person is liable to be charged more.
I know that this liable to be misinterpreted because unfortunately a clear line of communication does not work.
I think this relates to the NU concept - while we will have such plans, I think the easiest way (rather than charging people for GBs over-and-above what their plan allows) is to just turn them off completely if they cross that threshold - they can find out why it doesn't work during these hours by calling us or perhaps a DNS redirect of some sort will happen to alert the user that they have exceeded their limit for day usage and that they can either buy more data or wait for their internet to return at 8pm or 9pm or whatever the timings are.
On the other hand, to be very honest with you, even I don't know how much I would end up using. Let me propose an alternative way out. Assuming that the networks to start with are offered "unlimited" for say a trial period of about 3-6 months. This is good enough to give an indication of usage patterns and then tiered pricing can then be introduced. Just a suggestion. In any case, you would be offering 30-50 GB with the "lite plan" as mentioned; assuming that most of the rational users would hardly cross these limits.
Most people don't. But in all seriousness, 95% or more of people who aren't - let's face it - committing piracy - are unlikely to use more than 1GB per day.
This is partially why, for our lite plans, to be safe rather than sorry, we are offering more GBs than people are likely to use (again, we give people a sample usage pattern and we can determine the best plan based on that). In theory, if a subscriber uses every single GB on the lite plans, we'll make almost nothing on that subscriber: because these plans (as I have mentioned countless times) are not aimed at people who download a lot, but people currently on plans such as the data plans offered by BSNL and MTNL - 599 for 2.5GB usage.
The usage profile of such a subscriber might be like your parents (or my parents) who currently live inside these 2.5GB quotas, and *have* been stung once or twice by an extra 500MB of usage, but use the net to communicate with their children in other cities/countries via Skype Video, download/compose a few emails & attachments, browsing websites, flickr/picasa albums, facebook, maybe even some youtube stuff, but even after all that, they would probably hit maybe 70% of the quota if they're lucky... and on these plans, for now our margin is in those unused GBs.
My contention is that as a user, I don't want to calculate the byte going in and out. It goes for most of the customers too. At the same time, with a planned offering of say 30-50 GB I find it awkward to "monitor" the usage.
I agree. This is where our sales technique comes in: we can determine approximate usage based on how you think you'll use the net.
On a standard data plan, if it's too much, doesn't matter: data rolls over. If it's not enough, you know to buy more next time (and if that's too much, then it'll roll over again).
If it's a lite-plan, just upgrade or downgrade the plan as necessary - but my argument remains: if you're using over 30GB per month, you're probably not a lite user and the lite service probably isn't suitable for you.
Even then for those users who do use BitTorrent on a data (or lite) plan, uTorrent does have a monthly usage limit option, just in case.
I cannot claim for the outliers who would abuse the system in any case but then you have already outlined the safeguards accordingly.
I admit it is a tricky situation but there can never be a single unified answer.
Agreed. Nothing will suit everybody 100% perfectly, but there are only so many options we can give: the best we can do is come up with the best combination of options to suit as much of the subscriber base as possible.
I guess you missed my point. Your analogies are not appropriate apart from cable TV to an extent. There is no worthwhile pre-existing alternative to any of those services you mention.
On the other hand, with cloud computing, we are telling the customer that he need not have a high-end machine or a lot of expensive software at home. Instead he has a low end machine with a very good internet connection and uses it as a window to the cloud. That argument holds only if people are actually paying expensive prices for the software they use. In other economies, a typical home user would end up spending far more on software than he has on the hardware. Not so in India.
Hope you understand why I am saying cloud computing catching on is not imminent in India. Just my 2 cents.
There also hasn't been a very good platform for cloud computing in India so far. I think if users can have a basic machine which boots up in a couple of seconds (maybe via PXE boot ROM), and has maybe an SD-card slot and a suitable OS, then a cheap (maybe Rs5k) device might do the trick: especially for the lite-users and even more so for rural users.
I personally believe that Mathew's idea of a kind of soft limit which will not trigger action in just one month of minor abuse solves your problem. And he also has the provision to buy more data capacity in a kind of prepaid service. I think that is reasonable.
To expect that you would never need to be bothered about exceeding your bill, that is what FUP (with speed throttling) is all about and that is something that Mathew swears he will not do because he feels ashamed of calling 256 kbps broadband.
I do share your fear of a shocking bill at the end of the month but then again, aren't we susceptible to high electricity or telephone bills for overuse because there is no hard cap?
Also AFAIK, Mathew's plans are all prepaid so that takes care of the bill shock
1. Yes.
2. 256kbit/s still better than what we get throttled to in NZ (64k!)... but you're right, 256k sucks.
3. Finally... someone who gets it.
4. Not all - we can do the flat-rate plans on a postpaid basis, but I think for the purpose of buying data, it's easier for both us and for you if you buy what you think you'll need and then just recharge as you need it, otherwise there isn't an easy way to prevent bill shock if it's billed after the fact.
