[AusNOG] Optus cuts of pre-paid customers because they are introducing new plans

[Mark Smith]

On 26 September 2016 at 13:26, James Hodgkinson <yaleman at ricetek.net> wrote:
> It's curious that when we discuss free data for Netflix et al, people
> consider that to be abhorrent, but now having social media count as much
> as any other data is a game-changer.
>

I find both abhorrent. It is giving the largest organisations, who
need it the least, an advantage over their smaller competitors who
should have the advantage if any advantages are going to be given out.
It is an ISP selecting winners.

If you want to offer a better deal to customers than your competitors,
while also being fair, offer a bigger quota to all customers for them
to use as they like rather than zero-metering some specific content -
and you avoid the cost of the infrastructure and billing system
complexity to zero-meter which is non-trivial. Providing increased
value to customers should instead be as simple as updating quota
values in a database.

I don't know if this is a well known business rule, however it would
seem to me that you should never significantly increase your capex and
opex costs to then be able to give away more of your product for free.
It just seems logically contradictory.

Regards,
Mark.

> James
>
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2016, at 12:40, Mark Andrews wrote:
>>
>> Optus you are idiots.
>>
>> Optus failed to automatically processes scheduled recharges because
>> they are introducing new plans.  This left their customers without
>> service until they manually recharged.  This was done with no notice.
>>
>> The new plans no longer include social media and as Optus don't
>> supply a reasonable amount of usage data for pre-paid services like
>> they do for post-paid services its virtually impossible for consumers
>> to workout if the new plans are better or worse for them.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> --
>> Mark Andrews, ISC
>> 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
>> PHONE:  +61 2 9871 4742                  INTERNET: marka at isc.org
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