[AusNOG] NBNco: "Let's start competing with our customers!"

Thu Sep 17 19:20:52 EST 2015

On 17 Sep 2015 16:41, "Paul Brooks" <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 17/09/2015 3:25 PM, Paul Wilkins wrote:
>>
>> have a think about how local pizza
>> shops manage to survive in competition to national pizza
>> chains/franchises, who will have lower costs. They're all
>> fundamentally selling pizza, so how do local pizza shops get away with
>> not only selling the same thing, but probably make a much bigger
>> profit when doing it?
>>
>> Depends if you want something that someone has repackaged from an
industrial toxic spill, or a pizza.
>>
>> ISP's otoh largely can't differentiate their product.
>
> Seriously?
> iiNet/Westnet dined out on better customer care
> Internode had a rep for excellent network, a premium service they could
charge a premium price for.
> DoDo has a different niche.
> Some offer FetchTV over their network. A local/regional player could have
a dropin-centre where customers can bring in their devices for
cleaning/debugging/upgrading. Some have more peering than others.
> Internode is (was?) the only major IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack service around -
which is ridiculous, since anyone can supply IPv6 through Telstra Wholesale
ADSL.
>
> Differentiate yourself - turn on IPv6 for your customers, then shout it
from the rooftops.
>
>

IPv6 is important, but most customers are not going to see the value in it.

A simpler thing to do is to stop waiting for the customer to ring up with a
line fault, meaning that your only contact with them is when they've got a
fault and they've had to initiate getting it fixed.

Instead, using your authentication database,  identify customers who are
authenticating often. They'll likely have a line fault, so *protectively*
get it fixed. To make this visible to the customer, making them value your
service, call them up during or after dealing with the fault, letting them
know you've discovered it and are arranging to have our have fixed it.
They'll love that because you've fixed a problem for them that they may not
have even know they had, or needed to find time to call your help desk.

That will also shorten help desk phone queues for those who do have to call
you.

Another idea is to stop measuring help desk staffs' performance by number
of calls answered in an hour. That creates a perverse incentive to tell the
customer to reboot their router and to call back if that doesn't fix the
problem. Rebooting equipment never fixes the problem, it just makes it
disappear for a while.

Instead measure help desk performance by how often the customer *doesn't*
call back. If they only call once within a period of a week, that means the
help desk person solved their problem on the first call. Solving problems
is what help desk staff are there for, not to increment call per hour
counters.

Run network monitoring so that you can avoid congestion rather than waiting
for customers to call you, asking them to do annoying and long testing
procedures, as some ISPs seem to be doing.

Teach management what congestion is and how it damages the customer
experience. Even better, demonstrate those effects using a live demo where
you introduce increased latency and packet loss. Show then why when you say
the company needs to buy more bandwidth it  isn't to satisfy a bandwidth
fetish they might think you have.

Think about customer pain points and problems and then see if you can be
smart and avoid or mitigate them.

The better you look, the more you see.

>
>
>
>>
>> Paul Wilkins
>>
>> On 17 September 2015 at 13:07, Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 17 September 2015 at 09:57, Noel Butler <noel.butler at ausics.net>
wrote:
>>> > On 17/09/2015 09:37, Paul Brooks wrote:
>>> >
>>> > On 17/09/2015 7:56 AM, Skeeve Stevens wrote:
>>> >
>>> > I am saying that while the CVC should be like $2.... if they
aggregated
>>> > their PoI's, you'd need a lot less because it would scale much much
more and
>>> > it would actually costs less.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Methinks you're confusing topology with charging model. If you
negotiated
>>> > your wholesale backhaul provider to just add up all the traffic on
all the
>>> > POI ports and charge you for the aggregate, rather than per physical
port,
>>> > it wouldn't matter how many actual POIs there were.
>>> >
>>> > This whole mess also seems to hang on two assumptions:
>>> > 1) every ISP needs to service the whole national footprint
>>> > 2) every ISP needs to charge the same uniform retail price all over
the
>>> > footprint.
>>> >
>>> > Are either of these true?
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Of course they are - unless you want to be blasted into extinction
>>> >
>>> > 1 - a necessity to compete/survive
>>> >
>>> > 2 - a necessity to compete/survive
>>> >
>>> > I'm truly amazed someone on THIS list assuming they have any RSP
experience
>>> > even asks such a question
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>> If small players think they can out capitalise and out scale of
>>> economise much larger players, then they're never going to win.
>>>
>>> As a smaller RSP, If your only competitive advantage is your lower
>>> price, then you're vulnerable to your competitors lowering their
>>> prices. That is an easy and low effort decision by your competitors,
>>> and if they have larger margins to do it, because their scales of
>>> economy are larger and as they get larger volume discounts from their
>>> suppliers, they have much more room to lower their costs.
>>>
>>> It is a race to the bottom, and since you're starting much closer to
>>> the bottom than your competitors are, you'll lose (they will probably
>>> get in trouble for using their market power to crush you, however you
>>> may suffer a fatal blow before they get taken to court, the court case
>>> occurs etc., etc.)
>>>
>>> You're far better off trying to find something that your competitors
>>> can't or won't do, creating a barrier to entry. Then you have a unique
>>> advantage (i.e., a natural monopoly), which means customers must come
>>> to you to get it because they can't or can't easily get it from
>>> anybody else, and you can charge what your customers are willing to
>>> pay for your unique value, rather the same or a few percentage points
>>> lower than your competitors' prices.
>>>
>>> If you don't think this works, have a think about how local pizza
>>> shops manage to survive in competition to national pizza
>>> chains/franchises, who will have lower costs. They're all
>>> fundamentally selling pizza, so how do local pizza shops get away with
>>> not only selling the same thing, but probably make a much bigger
>>> profit when doing it?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> >
>>> >
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>>> >
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>>
>>
>>
>>
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