Re: Plusnet Usenet speeds, Official



"Geoff Winkless" <usenet-at-geoff-dot-dj@[127.0.0.1]> wrote in message news:45f6e683$0$7361$4d4eb98e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PlusNet Support Team wrote:
there's a break down of how the costs works out here for each of the accounts:
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/network/blueprint.shtml

£6.01 for "Infrastructure, customer support, profit margin, billing". Come on, that's just nonsense.

If you can have basic broadband for £9.99 that means I'm paying about £3.90 per month for telephone support (given the other main difference between plus and basic is the email & hosting, which you sell for £1.99). And I'm still having to pay you about 1.8p revenue share per minute on the phone call, 95% of which will be me sat in a queue so only 5% of the call will cost you anything from a personnel point of view.

Average call answer time today has been 4 minutes and 5 seconds, you can check this here:

http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=212

any revenue generated from the 0845 number will be very minimal but with average call times around 4 minutes or so it's about 50/50 in the queue/IVR and speaking to an analyst.



How many support guys do you have there... at a guess about 100? With 200k customers, that means a conservative guesstimate of £12.50 per subscriber per year, plus overheads, say £20pa. So that's actually £1.67 per month. Oh, and remember your revenue share, I doubt if you have much time when the lines aren't busy so say you get 20ppm on average for that, not a lot I know but still say £300 a day, which will cover off about 5% of your support costs. And you're getting a certain amount of 50ppm calls too.

No premium rate calls, the premium rate numbers have been off for months.


Tell me, what's the difference in "infrastructure and customer support" between premier and PAYG that makes Premier twice the amount? You'd think PAYG took _more_ effort to bill, not less.

Several factors. On cards that charge us a percentage of the amount (Amex certainly does this) rather than a fixed amount it will cost more to bill a higher amount. Premier customers are also more likely to be connected all the time than PAYG so this has to be factored into the equation as well as they are generally more likely to make use of the value added services like webspace, CGI, MySQL, Fax2Email etc. so more cost per customer. There's also a higher profit margin on Premier.


Isn't it actually true that the Premier users are being ripped off to finance the low-end £9.99 deals?

Err, no. The £9.99 account is a break even product. One of our business rules is that we don't sell a product at a loss.


To provision capacity to give the same priority to sustained downloads such as P2P and Usenet would require a higher amount of money going towards the bandwidth cost.

But that's the point. You should have a product which has a cost built-in for the peak bandwidth usage so that - if you're under your limit - it shouldn't matter what you download.

We do, it's called PAYG.

The thing is, that was meant to be Premier (it was certainly advertised as such). But you sold it too cheap because you wanted to get a customer base, then instead of doing the sensible thing and charging more for MAX you decided you could keep more customers by lying to them and letting them think they could keep on using the system as they had before while you managed their traffic, while denying it was happening so that they'd stay as long as you could until the BT deal went through.

On PAYG this is possible because customers pay for each 2GB as they use them so all traffic is in the two highest priority queues,

So give Premier back its £2 "premium" which you've just added on to the profit margin to make the figures agree with what you're saying, which makes the bandwidth allocation £6.90 or 10GB (near as dammit) and we're paying for our bandwidth too (at least to that point). Most people won't hit that peak anyway.


We have changed the profit margin on Premier, which is what's allowed us to activate a further 155Mbps segment in the last week to give better performance to P2P and Usenet. It takes time to balance new capacity into the network though.


--
| Dave Tomlinson Broadband Solutions For
| Customer Support for Home & Business
| PlusNet plc @ http://www.plus.net
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