High useage customers

[LRL]

I'm just curious how some of you handle high usage customers.

We've started to provide service for a few hotels and other public wifi businesses. Right now one of them is at 1260GB so far this month. Even though they are a business customer our soft cap is 550GB on their plan. What do you guys charge for overages?

[rebelwireless]

i usually address it with the customer personally, but that doesn't sound like a solution for you. If this is a hotel, then it sounds like you just need to address that they need a bigger plan or to dial back speeds. Maybe get them into a hotspot/hotel system with per device speed limits, or put them on a burstable queue with a long measurement period so heavy use gets dialed back.

[lligetfa]

There might be residents in the area that figured out how to leach free internet with high gain antennas. You might want to work with the business to help them curb the theft.

[rebelwireless]

There might be residents in the area that figured out how to leach free internet with high gain antennas. You might want to work with the business to help them curb the theft.

Another benefit of a hotspot system. You can see if a MAC address is sticking around too long, plus a voucher or daily code makes a big impact on nearby leechers.

I found a house with a nanobridge pointed at a business customer of mine a while back using their guest network. Found them in Unifi then spotted the nanobridge from the parking lot lol.

[sirhc]

There are several lines of thought here.

Normally HIGH bandwidth users fall into two categories, HD streamers and Torrent abusers.

When you scale back bandwidth to these you do not always get the desired effect.

Lowering the bandwidth to HD streamers may cause their service to auto drop to non HD video, say from 1024 to 720 or lower but they will either notice the video quality drop and call or they will not notice the difference as dumb people just select the HD option even to watch old non HD shows and Sponge Bob cartoons.

Torrent abusers will just take longer to download the same amount of data. The only problem I have with Torrent people are those that share and or those that decide they want to download everything in the e world just because they can. I do not support the use of software to download copyrighted material but at the same time I am not the police force for those large corporations. If my customer is smart and configures their Torrents to not share or only sip share to limited connections and they only download what they want to watch (provided they are not unemployed watching all day everyday) and stay within our soft CAPs I could care less so long as I am unaware of their activities.

Hotels and hot spots are difficult to manage so just assume it will be abused. You can determine what it cost you per Mbps from your upstream provider, then determine the average percentage of their pipe they use in a monthly average that they get from you.

Say you provide a 100 Mbps connection but when you look at the monthly average they consume it would be equal to them using a constant stream of 30 Mbps. Now assume you pay $10 per Mbps from your provider take the $10 x 30 Mbps = $300 and then multiply by 2 as you need to make a profit or why be in business so their monthly fee would be $600.

If they complain sit down and go over the costs, explain you have infrastructure to pay for, labor, tower rents, and so. Doubling the direct cost is not making a great profit when you look at all your expenses, maybe you decide to multiply by 3, you know your expenses. Also competition obviously effects your multiplier.

[LRL]

Right, we usually just call the customer and if the usage continues we ask them to upgrade to the proper tier for their usage. Unfortunately I don't have a tier that goes that high and I don't want to give them faster access. I talked to the customer once they exceeded the normal limit and we decided to wait till we had a good idea what a months usage would look like.

So far I'm estimating 1600-1700GB a month. I know Comcast charges like $10 for every 50GB over their limits (20 cents a GB). I know prior to us the cable company was charging them $200 a month for their normal service and then 300-500 a month for overage. Even if I figured the full 20Mbps my backbone cost is only $200, but as things would happen they are on our furthest tower from the headend. From that respect I'm thinking $500/month sounds reasonable for up to 2TB. Gives me the advantage of being more consistant bill wise then the local cable company, yet still good service to their customers.

I think I'm also going to pitch to the hotel a paid wifi, especially if they're concerned about the cost. Charge somewhere between $0.99-$2.99 a day and then maybe a weekly plan. They have somewhere between 100-200 rooms rented a day. From that respect a couple of good days could net more income for us then a simple higher plan.

The hotel is quite a way from any residential dwellings and I'm not seeing any lingering MACs aside from the APs and hotel's computers. We put a Mikrotik router in when we installed them to help them with torrent blocking. Unfortunately I underestimated the amount of streamers. We don't manage their APs just the router/gateway. Just that has provided a tremendous amount of insight to the real problem. I suppose another option is for us to set caps on the per IP basis and once they've reached the limit slow them to a crawl. As I understand it the guy who manages their APs has each AP throttled.

It's crazy, right now at 10:30 in the morning I show 65 clients and 35 active in the last 60 seconds.

[sirhc]

Hotels are moving away from charging for internet service to their customers, probably a hard pill to push. Adds complexity and guests expect free service and most middle class franchise agreements require fr service to guests. Some corporations allow their franchises to offer higher level pay services but as I said it gets complex and they just do not like it.

I would stick with coming up with a monthly fee that you feel comfortable with like your suggestion of $500 but you know your customers better.