Point 1) Many ISP's have policies in place already and changing
acceptable use and billing policies almost *never* makes customers happy
and usually pisses many off. This is not something that we like to do.
In this case, we aren't having a major problem with this, but the
administrative solutions to this sometimes are not nearly as workable as
you engineer people seem to think. It would take some *major* hacking
to our billing system to bill people for duplicate logins, and we'd much
rather just prevent them in the first place (like I said, its not a
major problem for us...right now).
Point 2) Livingston engineering attitudes. Now, I don't mind MZ's
gruff responses....for the most part, they are on target, address the
question, and give good answers. However, I've noticed that in this
issue, (and in a couple of others that we've dealt with in the past)
that Livingston Engineering seems to think that they know absolutely
everything about how to run an ISP....regardless of the market and other
conditions. Sorry folks, there's not some manual saying this is how you
set up your billing system, this is your acceptable use policy, etc.
ISP's do things different ways. In our case, billing people for
duplicate logins is not acceptable and not feasible. In a previous case,
we had an RFE that we spoke with Bri about at Interop in ATL last
year...he took it to engineering and the word that we got back was the
engineering said that this particular feature wasn't needed by anyone.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. First off, your engineering department
doesn't know every possible way that an ISP might use your products and
what would be needed from them because of that, second, your engineering
department *certainly* doesn't know all about the local market that we
are competing in and the competition that we are facing. In this
situation, I'm particularly ammused at MZ telling us all to make our
billing system more restrictive and bill people more for less service,
when the market forces are pushing exactly the opposite way...haven't
you seen all the advertisements for $19.95 (or less) flat rate? If we
sell a flat rate account at $19.95 (as most other ISP's are doing these
days) and then start billing for a duplicate login, users are going to
cry foul and split for another provider, cause if you do that, then its
really not flat rate, now is it?
-- Jeff McAdams | A feature is a bug IgLou Internet Services | with seniority. e-mail: jeffm@iglou.com | -- unknown