'"Normal" is whatever the user normally tries to do.' That's simply not a realistic definition. There's no way to determine what a consumer will want to do before they sign up for the service. For that matter, it's impossible to determine what a customer will want 2 years after they've signed. Further, its impossible to understand what is normal without spying on your customers. '"Reasonable" is whatever the user is willing to pay for. Any mismatch between the two finds its error in your marketing department.' Reasonable pricing is what the market will bear as always, but what the market will bear versus what customers *expect* often greatly diverge. Anyone who wants to pay for a direct connection to a Tier 1 of their choice with SLAs can do so, but that's not that doesn't happen. 'Seems like a competitive service provider focused on meeting that customer population's needs would do well. Any notion what has prevented that from happening?' They *are *the alternative operator in this market. What's keeping anyone else from doing it better is that it's more expensive than customers will pay to "do it better". Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms -------------------------------- On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 3:17 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:
The problem is in defining what is "normal" and "reasonable" when customers only know what those mean in regards to their behavior and not the larger customer base nor the behavior of the global network.
Hi Scott,
"Normal" is whatever the user normally tries to do. "Reasonable" is whatever the user is willing to pay for. Any mismatch between the two finds its error in your marketing department.
If your understanding of normal and reasonable radically diverges from this, you've made a mistake. It's exactly as simple as this.
I have a customer on the west coast that has a very large Asian immigrant population and a very high percentage of the traffic from this access provider is going to and from Asia. This introduces a lot of variables that are far outside of the operator's control, so what's reasonable for this operator to do to ensure "reasonable" speeds when the links to Asia get saturated far upstream of them? They certainly could choose to buy alternative connectivity to that region, but then they'd have to raise rates and most of the time that extra connectivity isn't needed.
So what are they doing? Playing it one-size-fits-all and giving this "very large" customer population no way to get acceptable speed to the portions of the Internet that population wants to reach?
Seems like a competitive service provider focused on meeting that customer population's needs would do well. Any notion what has prevented that from happening?
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>