On Mon, 25 Dec 2006, Simon Leinen wrote:
Yes. With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users' consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP doesn't save much. A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak traffic (or not as much). Our charging scheme works like that, but our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.
Also, doing fine grained measurements for all your customers (if you have millions of residential users) is a big pain. Yes, it makes sense to only count usage perhaps between 16.00-02.00 or so, but trying to do this in an efficient manner and handle the customer complaint calls might very well be more expensive than actually not doing it at all. Cost of customer interaction should never be underestimated. The simpler the service, the less things that can go wrong, the less customer service calls you get. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se