Thread: Hayai Broadband: How it all began!

Originally Posted by iPiyush

^^ 'Free' in my opinion would be too much you may give discounts like upto 50% or something which you may decide and give to students, doctors, senior citizens, war veterans, etc, hope you get the idea.

Even I think this really deserves to be a sticky and would agree that this is definitely the hottest thread on this forum.

Fair enough - I was thinking "free" up to a point - there might be a special student package that would have a 5GB monthly limit on it or something, and possibly traffic shaping to prevent things like torrents - and maybe special access to educational material (which, naturally, being hosted by us wouldn't count towards the quota).

In NZ, the government "sponsors" high-speed internet for doctors and such who make use of things like electronic claiming (for insurance, social security etc) and all the types of things which will probably be coming to India with this new ID-card you're all going to have.

These things the existing ISPs could be doing but are not.

Originally Posted by iPiyush

^^ Right, I agree, well, but after reading the first post in this thread again, carefully, I don't agree with this point
# *IF* we have to put a fair-usage policy on "unlimited" plans, the likely option is to simply reduce the speed (maybe all tiers will go to 512kbps), rather than charge for going over the Fair Usage Policy.
I believe you should follow a policy like suppose a guy has a 2Mbps connection he should not be put on 512Kbps when he crosses his limit but instead on 1Mbps and then maybe it should be like this for the whole month or maybe you may have a 2nd Fair Usage Policy with a much lower limit and then the user should be sent to 3/4 of the speed that guy is paying for, in this case, 512Kbps for the whole month.

But then there is that big 'IF' there.

And here I was thinking I was being reasonable

In New Zealand, they take you down to 64kbits only if you go over your quota - even if you're on the 24Mbits plan!!

512kbps doesn't make the service unusable, and I would imagine that, if people are paying for different speed tiers, then the "Fair Usage Policy" for each plan would be different - for example:

If the Fair Usage Policy for a 20Mbit connection is 200GB, then going by that logic, a 50Mbit connection might allow 500GB.

In most cases, reducing a 50Mbit connection to 25Mbits is barely noticeable unless you're clocking downloads, hence perhaps a drastic reduction is needed in order for the policy to be effective.

The reason for this is, it doesn't theoretically cost me really a great deal more to provide a customer with a 1Mbit connection versus an 8Mbit connection (ADSL version 1 speeds) - what does cost is the GB of transfer - whether it's transferred at 1Mbit or 8Mbits, it still costs me basically the same.

This was another motivation for me to eliminate speed caps on some plans (pre-paid) and just have users purchase data, although certainly not at Rs 600 per gigabyte (if we go by Airtel prices).

For other plans, basically speaking once the user reaches a certain number of gigabytes, as soon as s/he goes over that limit, it's eating directly in to the profit margin, which leaves the potential for the company to go under - and the government isn't bailing us out - after all, this isn't the US ;)

As such, a Fair Usage Policy to reduce the speed to something less (eg 512kbits) after X gigabytes of international transfer seems to be the best option - keeping in mind that this speed reduction still only applies to international traffic, not in-network traffic, so users on DCPP or Bittorrent or transferring files over Skype/MSN (assuming both users are Hayai customers, of course) are not affected.

With keeping the in-network speed to a maximum, I figure at the very least I'm helping to save the environment by reducing the number of DVDs being burned and distributed by the... uh... DVDwalas? And faster speeds also mean (indirectly) less power bills, which will keep a lot of parents/bill-payers happy

Originally Posted by iPiyush

^^ Ok, I understand your problem.
Anyways in the first post you also mention
Possibly an iTunes-like store for Indian (Hindi and other) content, including Music and Movies - if possible, anyway. Downloading from either the software repos or the music store would not be included in your quota (as in, downloads would be free and fast).
Would your subscriber have to buy/pay for it like the song/movie/anything which he is buying? Otherwise, in my opinion it would amount to piracy, I suppose?

Yes, of course users would have to pay for the songs/movies etc, except where those are in the public domain - simply the bandwidth would be free, so you could download say, 5GB of music and use none of your quota - as opposed to downloading it from Limewire or something and using 5GB of your quota. This would be one of the many value-added-services we hope to integrate in to our service offerings.

Originally Posted by saurabh28

Launch Unlimited plans with good Fair Usage Policy

It is my goal, and we will do it if it becomes at all possible. As of now, it's a definite maybe. I have a meeting on Tuesday (4 August) which should give me a better answer as to the possibilities on this.

Originally Posted by yashasvi

hey, I don't know if this is real, But if it is all legit, I will definitely look into the aspect switching as I'm on the look out for the fastest internet I can get. Now I noticed that you had limits in bandwidth and a fair usage policy, that's a big no-no from me, if you have caps on data transfer you could count a vast majority of prospective buyers including me back out, I would be willing to shell out 3-4k for good speed( presently get 1mbit but would like more for the price). You're company seems to be coming along very well, If you're ever in need of beta tester etc, you can always contact me as I'd be willing to do it for free and would give you excellent feedback. Lastly I wish you success in your endeavors and think you are doing something good and am sure you will be well received by the city of Mumbai.

The original plans were simple: For every Mbit speed tier, there would be a 10GB data quota attached to it - so a 10Mbit connection would have a 100GB quota and a 100Mbit connection would have a 1TB quota etc. For some people this is suitable, others not.

I also can't stress enough that, with more customers joining the network, the number of local peers in applications such as bit-torrent will go up, reducing the amount your torrents will eat in to your quota, in addition to things like Windows Updates and so forth as mentioned also.

Even then, I understand that quotas don't work well with many people on this forum, however for someone like my mother-in-law who mainly checks email and visits youtube now and then (she's currently on 128k), a speed boost is better than slower unlimited access - she visits the US several times a year and complains about how slow the net is when she comes home to India.

Because of this, I'm working and reworking the plans to have several options available, and my "magical spreadsheet" becomes ever more complicated, and I'll explain also about the Fair Usage Policy in a bit, because I too am not a fan. Most of you have probably heard by now where I've come from and what I'm used to - and why using the Internet in this country makes me cringe.

As it stands now, the options are:

• Fixed-line (prepaid): No speed limit, buy a certain amount of data at a fairly decent rate. Once the limit is being approached (say 95%) user gets warnings when browsing suggesting that it's time to top up (similar to when you get low balance on your mobile).
• Fixed-line (postpaid): Limited speed in tiers from 1 to 200Mbits. Some plans will be unlimited, others will have caps (so for tiers up to 24Mbits, I expect there would be a quota plan and an unlimited plan at a different price).
• On unlimited plans, ***IF*** we have to apply a fair usage policy, it will certainly be generous - as I may have already mentioned, they will be at least on-par with policies in Europe and the USA.
• Mobile: Undecided on the speed limits - maybe also no limit, user buys data, and the throughput of the service depends on which data card you buy: the cheapest provides maybe 2.5Mbits, mid-range provides 7Mbits and top provides 21mbits; though this may also be confusing, so chances are that, as with the fixed lines, there would be pre-paid options with unlimited speed and post-paid options with different speeds and data packages.
• For ALL plans, in-network downloads should be max-speed, and not counting towards quota.
• For ALL plans connections are synchronous - that is, if you have 8Mbits down, you have 8Mbits up also (except in certain circumstances, such as mobile/3GPP, due to the fact that the equipment handles only 21Mbits down and 5.5Mbits up). Otherwise, considering most fixed-line solutions will be delivered by fibre-optics, we see no need to limit upload speed also.

Price-wise, for Rs 4k, it is likely that we would do probably about 8Mbits/80GB cap, but the prices are not final due to all the negotiations and changes going on at the moment.

As mentioned, check back with me on Tuesday or Wednesday. When the network does begin going live, and we start testing the different equipment for day-to-day use, be assured that we will be looking here first for testers.