Ars Technica has the Belgian Bandwidth Hog story and even credits me, thanks Nate, but one element is missing, what does the little piggy cost?
2.7TBybte is roughly 9 mbit/s sustained traffic.
1mbit/s/month of transit is $1 wholesale now in London and Amsterdam through Hurricane Electric -->9 dollar
If you would work with a day and night rythm for the traffic, where the average peak is about twice the average--> 18 dollars. --> do understand that an ISP like Telenet will use peering too, which would result in a lower bandwidth bill.
If you buy the traffic up front from a hosting company 20 euro per Terabyte retail --> 54 euro
If you need to buy the traffic because you went over the traffic you bought up front it's 50 euro per Terabyte retail. --> 135 euro
So the top downloader in Belgium is most likely still profitable to Telenet... though marginally
Last year I gave two presentations at eComm Europe. Both were captured on video. The first one, on interconnection and telephone pricing, was up for some weeks. The second one, on telecom marketing and product management, is now available for your viewing pleasure. It aligns well with my previous blog post on choosing simplicity. Please if you have any comments send them.
It seems that almost every town now has an "unlimited meals" Chinese-Japanese restaurant .The principle is simple enough, the customer is free to take from an unlimited buffet or ordering the dishes on the menu.There are some rules: drinks not included and a fine for food left over.
The choice of customer options are reduced to a choice: do we eat here tonight or not.Yes, there is also a choice of dishes, but the choice for one another court does not.It is this limited choice that the formula for other interesting businesses.
Choice
Choice seems good.Any marketer can you explain, you have your product in order to segment all product-market combinations to serve. An ideal marke produces for every consumer the ideal product.
This requires not only a producer who knows what his customers want, but also a customer who knows exactly what his needs are and which supplier can meet these.And there lies his problem: many customers are not happy from a multitude of choices.
Satisfied
Scientific research shows that if a customer gets a lot of choices, the customer is less satisfied and chooses less .The paradox of choice that customers experience a stress choice and that choice stress leads to dissatisfaction with the choice (what else) and even to completely postpone a choice.(For a more detailed explanation, see this amazing video of Professor Barry Schwartz at TED).
That limiting choice in other sectors can work well, for example in France shown by ISPs.In the Netherlands can choose between a variety of subscriptions for different prices.The customer must choose between different Internet speeds, unlimited calling or not, or not HD Plus package.
Offer
In France, most, but Internet providers offer a quick internet with unlimited calls to landlines in France and many foreign countries and including HD TV.The customer receives a simple choice and do not go there to think about and thus avoids a lot of stress choice.This simplicity can also be achieved elsewhere.
Is the customer really waiting for a further tiered Internet, energy supply, zorgpolis or mortgage?Probably not.What customers want is, quick-acting and the Internet, a good insurance, stable energy prices and a fair mortgage.
The comprehensive simplicity translates to the supplier not only sell more, but also savings in the internal organization.A customer who is happy with the choice and no choice less stress, call the help desk, looks less at the competitor and the entire back office can be simplified.
Bonus
An extra bonus for the organization to simplify its product offering a choice is the addition of the word free product.By simplifying the supply and simultaneously increase sales in the package, certain elements "free" added to the product offering.
Lets just say one free of the most powerful words in marketing.A product that comes with free items is almost irresistible scientific research shows to see.
Think of a telecom product with free international calls, an insurance policy with free dental visit or a car with free navigation.A simple product with free features, that is what the customer wants.
Rudolf van der Berg Management Consultant for Business Logic Consulting.His work lies at the interface between government, telecom, energy and strategy.Rudolf.van.der.berg @ logica.com LinkedIn / Rudolf vander Berg
I knew this for a while already. Now it is on the wweb. KPN has moved to CDMA450 for M2M applications. CDMA450 offers DSL like speeds with very good propagation qualities. Bonus is that KPN only needs 50 sites to cover the country. As it is the only one who has this spectrum in The Netherlands, it might be an extremely valuable proporty to offer customers multi mode coverage. It's late so further speculation will have to wait. (thanks KH for the tip)
I hope to publish much more on M2M in the coming weeks. Mostly on the costs of switching operators and what the effect of some regulatory changes may be.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from the NPR radio programme Marketplace Morning Edition if I wanted to do an interview on the future of phone numbers in the light of Vonage and Facebook working together. I had a really nice phone call of about ten minutes with the editor that you hear in the segment, Jill Barsay. We discussed mr. Strowger and his competitors wife and Skype etc. etc. I tried to keep my answers to sound bites... quite hard to do, but fun.. So this afternoon I tune in to the website, find my piece and yes, I've been reduced to a 4 second blurb. :-) That's being a pundit for you. Listen to it, or read the transcript here:
Best thing is there is a memorisation expert in there, who had memorized a phone book. Great... now go and learn all the facebook accounts, URI's, e-mail adresses etc.
Wired had this datafile on its website and I must say I am flabbergasted. It seems to bear little relationship to broadband data for fixed networks. For instance France is by far the most expensive. A gigabyte of data costs about as much as 1 month of unlimited calling to 100 nations, 28mbit DSL and HD-TV. Belgium is expensive too, just like their broadband, so no surprises there, but the Netherlands is a laggard too and data is cheap in NL. Germany is the exact opposite, it is a wired broadband laggard, but one of the cheapest countries when it comes to mobile data. Why a German Vodafone customer pays 15 times less per bit than a Dutch one is just baffling. Have fun with the data and tell me what you think.
Slide with your mouse over the countries and the prices to see more information, for instance that Europeans pay a hefty extra for buying Apple.
And here is a version that I hacked together to show the costs for the cheap version together with the expensive version. The sorting is still done by the expensive version, with the high usage, but the bar extends to the price per gigabyte of the cheap version. It's not perfect but it's getting there. Also I hacked together two versions that show per country what the price ranges of the operators are and per operator what different prices they charge in different countries. (T-Mobile NL was mislabelled by the original source and I can't fix that). Yet another version might be to show the differences in absolute prices, regardless of the amount of gigabytes. And I think the 30 Gigabytes that the original calculators used for the unlimited version is a bit too high, bringing down the lowest per Gigabyte charges too much.
