25gb speed=12mbps with 25gb is it wow?

[xserver]

Having fine control over the billing system is not the problem - having what would technically amount to being a custom plan for each individual customer, THAT is the problem, because the logic involved (which is how the billing system is going to calculate things) is difficult to implement.

This is why (as I suggested earlier) it's best to only have one variable change in the plan... that is to say either speed or data (not both) otherwise the amount of plans you have to program in to the billing system increases not linearly, but exponentially. More to the point, I don't know any respectable ISP anywhere in the world that wrote it's own billing system in-house but frankly,such a project would surely be a disaster because ISPs are not accountancy firms or lawyers, and most programmers aren't either.

If you want to be the best cook then you need to learn to pick your own vegetables. The same goes for every industry. Data / Speed is alright but why limit the customer for 1 month prepaid ? Why not more granularity ?

[color=rgb(40,40,40);font-family:'Droid Sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;]Sure, but you ensure accuracy how, exactly? This is one of the biggest complaints I saw when I was building up: people claiming inaccurate billing and/or massive bill shock when some grandma receives an Internet bill for a lakh.[/color]

That's exactly why we have the term *PREPAID* so that you cannot be over billed.

[color=rgb(40,40,40);font-family:'Droid Sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;]When you're billing voice, you're billing only one variable: time. When you're billing for Internet services, ideally you're only billing for data, so such topups become completely feasible (and this is how certain plans on my network work), but what you seemed to be suggesting is for both to factor (as if you might pay less per GB at 512k than at 10mbit/s).[/color]

When you are billing Voice you are doing real time rounded to seconds. Data is no where near that kind of complicated. You are unsure because you are yet to witness, I am sure because i have already deployed it.
Exactly , I will pay less for 10GB @ 512kbps as compared to 10GB @ 1Gbps because i am completing my task in greater amount of time and i have limited budget. The same way people like to travel in Indian Railways as Compared to Flight.

[color=rgb(40,40,40);font-family:'Droid Sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;]Airtel already does bill for both speed and data, with optional "smartbytes" addons - and look how well that's turning out.[/color]

Airtel does it badly doesn't mean that it has to be bad. if that's the conclusion you want to raise then what was your reason of launching Hayai ? To offer something better which other are failing to do .. Right ?

 

[mgcarley]

If you want to be the best cook then you need to learn to pick your own vegetables. The same goes for every industry. Data / Speed is alright but why limit the customer for 1 month prepaid ? Why not more granularity ?

For a similar comparison, when you buy a prepaid SIM, even a "lifetime validity" SIM is valid for up to 6 months before you have to recharge it, but the minutes/credit are valid according to the topup or when you use them. Similarly, we allow subscribers to opt for longer, but not shorter.The reason for this is that it wouldn't make sense to go shorter, at least not under normal circumstances, especially if new fiber is being built. In such a case, minimum terms must be imposed to cover the cost of the construction of that infrastructure unless you'd rather pay the full price of the installation up front. Complain all you like but there's a good reason for this too: when you lay a wire to a premises, it goes only to that premises and can only be used there. When you install a cellular tower, it goes everywhere, regardless of who is using it.So exactly what kind of granularity are you looking for in a wired product?

That's exactly why we have the term *PREPAID* so that you cannot be over billed.

Perhaps but on the flipside you'd get complaints from people who insist they haven't in fact used that 100GB of data they just purchased last week and demand that you give them more for free (whether they did or whether it's some fault of the billing system, the fact of the matter is that there is the burden of proof and digging through records and all sorts of other nonsense to prove that you weren't overcharging the subscriber when all that searching has probably cost the provider at least as much as just shelling out another 100GB of free data would have cost.

When you are billing Voice you are doing real time rounded to seconds. Data is no where near that kind of complicated. You are unsure because you are yet to witness, I am sure because i have already deployed it.

Prove it. I bill quite a lot of data every day. Even though it's not technically part of my job, I test and re-test my systems constantly to make sure they can do what I want them to - mostly because I care about the experience.I agree that it's not complicated when you only bill according to one variable. But when you have to bill according to 2 or 3 the amount of work required goes up exponentially and there are more mistakes. It's easy enough to bill by the second as it is by the kilobyte or megabyte, but how about if we billed by the second according not just to which network you were calling but to which phone number and the quality of the call (you could pay 20p/min for a crap quality call or Re1/min for super-duper quality, for example). It would get pretty ridiculous.

Exactly , I will pay less for 10GB @ 512kbps as compared to 10GB @ 1Gbps because i am completing my task in greater amount of time and i have limited budget. The same way people like to travel in Indian Railways as Compared to Flight.

Except that's not really a very good comparison, because the trains and the planes don't use the same infrastructure. They also can't carry the same amount of people at a time. Assuming you're using the same wired network (whether DSL, DOCSIS, FTTH or whatever, doesn't matter) the same basic cost to deliver data from point A to point B is very approximately the same.If I'm on a shiny new ftth network for example, 1GB of data costs basically the same at 512k as it does at 100mbit/s or 1000mbit/s - do you really think it costs me only Rs5/GB at 512k as opposed to say Rs50/GB at 1gbps? No. The cables and equipment cost the same no matter what speed I deliver it at. I still have to buy a ton of bandwidth to supply everyone else at the same time, so why the hell should I charge you differently just because you're getting it slower? Doesn't make sense.

Airtel does it badly doesn't mean that it has to be bad. if that's the conclusion you want to raise then what was your reason of launching Hayai ? To offer something better which other are failing to do .. Right ?

There were a whole lot of factors. I felt I could do it better, and a lot of ideas were either crowd-sourced or thrown about here to be voted on.