deep16 said:
planning to launch in kolkata ????????.. its one of the most neglected city in whole india.. only bsnl is the player.. but i dnt wnt to commment on their servc and downtime,, relnc and airtel present but crap plans... so out of question... looking forward to hayai...
Absolutely. You should probably see the FAQs page on IBF (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to it here) - the same which will be on our website (by popular request).
reddy8155 said:
Check out this article on arstechnica. Netflix says it costs ISP's a penny to carry a GB of data on their last mile network.
Netflix: ISPs who charge by the gigabyte are ridiculous
There's two sides to the Netflix/ISP battle, and I should point out that this has a lot more to do with them being charged by the GB for connecting to ISP networks, and that there's a lot more than meets the eye about the whole thing which many people don't know about or realize.
Netflix historically has been a peer with many ISPs, which has afforded it some luxuries that it now no longer will have. Every peering agreement basically stipulates that each peer has to have approximately balanced traffic levels for both ingoing and outgoing, and that additionally, a peer may ONLY send traffic to the network that it's peering with, and NOT use the peers network as transport to get to another network.
However, the time has come now that Netflix is sending more than 5x the amount of traffic that it receives, which violates the peering agreement, and now puts it in to a different category of connectivity. It is no longer a peer, it is a content provider, and they are bound to slightly different rules and slightly different pricing.
In the US, things are far different to the situation in India - whereas 80+% of their traffic is domestic, 80+% of Indian traffic heads to, you guessed it, the US. As such, most traffic between ISPs in the US is peered, and peered traffic costs sweet bugger all when broken down to a per GB basis. On the other hand, Indian ISPs might be subjected to an equivalent price per GB of up to Rs34 (worst case scenario, it's possible to negotiate this to be much much lower - under Rs10/GB in some cases, but not Re1/GB... yet, even for BSNL, who buys traffic in multiples of 10gbit/s).
Furthermore, peered traffic in India costs if done at NIXI - that price is set at Rs25 for incoming traffic, minus Rs25 for outgoing traffic. This seems to be the ONLY internet exchange in the entire world who charges for usage, a practice which I think is utterly ridiculous. So for some ISPs which might have 1:1 traffic ratios, no problem. But most ISPs don't - many that I've spoken to are talking about ratios of 3:1 in: out, plus the 3 lakhs/year subscription fee. At 1Gbit/s and 80% utilization, this could work out to be something like 44 lakhs per month, or about Rs17/GB, making this traffic easily the most expensive in India.
This creates a problem for Indian ISPs in that, they have these (relatively speaking) high operational costs because 1. Most traffic goes overseas and 2. Peered traffic is charged in a ridiculous fashion (peered traffic is supposed to be a flat-rate, and very very cheap - after all, it only involves pulling a cable from one side of a room in to another side of the same room). In Finland they charge about 250 euros a month to peer at 1gbit/s, and about 1000 euros a month for 10gbit/s peering - no usage charges. In Amsterdam it's also quite cheap (I forget the exact prices, but it's similarly cheap). Hayai New Zealand pays about NZ$700 per month including transport for 1Gbit/s (exchange rate is about Rs34 to NZ$1).
Indias pricing model for peered traffic also creates another unusual situation - there have been cases where I've been shown screenshots of traceroutes for users getting traffic from Delhi to Delhi (for example) - and seeing that traffic go via Singapore. Why would they do this? International traffic is cheaper, peering in Singapore is much cheaper (and flat-rate). More recently I was alarmed when I was alerted of traffic between MTNL Delhi and MTNL Mumbai going via... Paris.
Now, on the other side of the coin, unlimited access per customer is a bit of a farce, but then it also comes down to reasonable pricing as well. If the cost to the ISP for the traffic is, let's say, 1 cent (as above), then they shouldn't be charging a full $1 for it. 10 cents seems much more reasonable. Or even 5 - whatever covers the costs and gives them a sufficiently healthy margin.
ISPs should be making it their duty to cache and peer with as many entities as possible. Again, citing practices I'm seeing outside of India, for example, Sky NZ (the only DTH provider in NZ) has recently launched a service called "iSky". Basically it allows you to watch the same channels you subscribe to normally through their website.
NZ is a country which doesn't have any unlimited internet plans. Hasn't had any since the dial-up days. But Sky has partnered with a number of ISPs as a content provider in order to deliver this service in such a way that the customers don't get charged for using iSky because the ISP considers it to be traffic originating from within their own network and doesn't charge the customer for it - and I believe that the same should be able to happen in India.
Which brings me on to my service. While we are having some flat-rate plans, they're a bit on the expensive side for some people (I've explained why in another forum, but we have our reasons, and it has a lot to do with the pricing mentioned above, and also that we aren't offering any flat-rate pricing where the speed is less than 5mbit/s, and that even IF we had a fair usage policy with solid numbers, the lowest plan wouldn't be less than about 200GB). Because of the starting price for flat-rate, we also have data plans, which are Rs550 (which covers all infrastructure, it's a brand new FTTH network we're building) + data usage.
This might look awful, until you see what it all costs: we're only charging Rs10/GB for data (including tax). And it's delivered at 100mbit/s. BSNL charges not less than Rs200 for data, most others between Rs400-600 depending on the plan. So it works out very reasonable, and even compared to some ISP's "unlimited" plans (which as we know, are rarely unlimited these days), we do pretty well.
Since the speed is so high, we have 2 options for data plans: 1 is prepaid, which means you just buy however much data you think you'll need whenever you want (with validity of either 360 days or until used), the other is a post-paid option whereby you limit the bill to any amount you please, and the system will invoice you at the end of the month for your usage up to that limit. So hypothetically, if you set your bill limit to be Rs1,000, and you use 20GB in that month, you'll be sent a bill for Rs750 only (Rs550 infrastructure + 20GB x Rs10 = 750).
The lowest denomination we can charge to is 50 paise, which conveniently works out to about 50MB, so we charge to the nearest 50MB - but 50 paise here or there shouldn't concern anyone, really.
But wait, there's more!
Certain traffic is not counted in this data usage (see the iSky bit above). Additionally, certain other things like P2P transfers between customers are not counted either (makes a good breeding ground for things like DC++) and we're even running a private torrent tracker and a special caching system which can even cache bittorrent/rapidshare/etc traffic from outside the network. That is, we're doing everything we possibly can to try and not have to charge customers for data usage.
If there was a Netflix in India, I'd probably have them connect to my network as a content provider and charge them accordingly (after all, they charge their customers for the digital downloads), and in turn, traffic to/from Netflix would not be counted - in other words, free. ISPs in the US could easily do the same thing, and by charging a reasonable rate to Netflix, and not charging customers for the privilege of using Netflix (that would be double-dipping), then customers wouldn't have to worry about customers busting their data caps/fair usage policies by downloading a couple of HD movies a month and Netflix could be happy because they can deliver bandwidth to customers easily enough without the customers potentially coming back and blaming Netflix for high bandwidth charges.
..........Phew, I think that's all
