This post is the third in a three-part series about the financial side of things. In Part 1, talked about the systems we built for us to monitor network usage and for our users to buy and sell credit. In Part 2, we covered our operating expenses, and discussed some of the different considerations and models of how to bill users. In this part, I’m going to wrap things up by sharing some of the tricks and approaches that we can use to improve network performance and service for our users, and then providing some alternate funding models.
Local Services
In our network, a huge difference exists (in terms of network performance and congestion as well as cost) between traffic that stays local and traffic that goes out over the satellite link to connect to the Internet. Though our backhaul connection from our tower to the Internet is only 1 Mbps, the fronthaul connection from phones to the tower is much higher – we’ve seen speeds of 75 Mpbs for an individual user, and LTE offers theoretical speeds of up to 150 Mbps. Local communication, like sending a file from one person to another, doesn’t actually use the satellite link at all, and works even if we get cut off from the Internet. This brings up the question of “should we offer a local-only option?”
If we do decide to provide the option of local-only service to users, we also have to figure out what it should cost. There’s one argument that says we should charge them only for power, because that’s the really the only cost service they’re using. On the other hand, there are very good reasons for us to charge them more, and put that money towards the cost of the backhaul connection. Not only does everyone in the community benefit from Internet connectivity (non-paying users often request paying users to perform services for them), but we could potentially offer “lower priority” Internet connectivity when available. Remember – because the backhaul cost is fixed per month, every second we’re not using the Internet is a second that we paid for and simply didn’t use. Moreover, putting more money towards the backhaul could result in cheaper Internet access per user, which in turn incentivizes more users to join the network and creates one of those positive cycles I talked about in Part 2.
At the same time, we’re also actively working to improve what services are “local” by hosting them within the community on our server. If Gmail struggles behind a slow satellite connection, that’s a great reason for us to host a local email server. The exact same thing could be said for higher-bandwidth services, like streaming video with our own media server, or caching web content. I’ll save this discussion for another post, but we packaged CoLTE with many such services, including OpenStreetMaps and a chat server. Going further, improving Internet/Web performance at the network edge is one of my primary research interests, and I hope to pursue this topic at a painful level of detail before too long.
Limited Services
In addition to a local services option, we’ve also considered a “limited services” package that provides Internet access only to a select set of websites/services at a reduced (or free) cost. This package would likely be focused around calling and texting services (e.g. WhatsApp and Skype), but could also include other select websites such as Wikipedia.
The “limited services” idea stems primarily from the observation that many of the most socially useful services are also very low-bandwidth. For example, a standard-quality VoIP call requires only 20 kbps of bandwidth, potentially less under certain conditions, and WhatsApp text messages barely any bandwidth at all (Though these conclusions are intuitive and based largely on observed experience, we’re hoping to formally quantify this traffic soon!) These characteristics stand in stark contrast to other Internet services that provide a relatively low social benefit at a much larger cost of bandwidth, such as video streaming or online gaming. This dichotomy naturally led us to discussions around the idea of “we’re not making any money off of WhatsApp anyways, so why not just give it away for free?” Going even further, I’m almost certain that we could strongly prioritize VoIP traffic such as Skype and WhatsApp, and dramatically improve the social utility of our network, without our general Internet users even noticing the difference.
Thanks For Reading!
A fascinating theme that’s emerged in this series of posts is the intersection of technical engineering, socio-economic engineering, and what’s best for the individual community. One of the major takeaways of this entire series should be that the options are literally endless – especially since when the community is it’s own ISP, their interests are perfectly aligned. As we deploy additional networks in different areas, we’re hoping to build and research literally all of these topics, with the end goal being something as close to a set of “best practices” as possible. As always, thanks for reading, and please comment or reach out if you’ve got any thoughts or questions.
The Community LTE Project 