Pricing Broadband Internet Adaptive Services

Abstract

Broadband Internet pricing scheme should charge users based on their consumption pattern. It could avoid resource wasting because light users will not have to subsidize heavy users. Furthermore, a fair pricing scheme could save bandwidth during hours of day, which would improve broadband carriers capacity management and planning efforts. This paper presents a fair broadband pricing scheme where users' adaptive applications are configured to adjust their demand in accordance with several parameters, such as user's budget, estimated future needs, and usage price defined and published by the service provider. We simulate our pricing scheme and three others schemes using real data from a broadband Internet Service Provider (ISP) in order to analyze bandwidth saving and utility obtained by users. We show that in the proposed pricing scheme 15% of users have positive payoff, 1% have negative, and for the rest of the users the payoff is zero. We also present the re-distribution of the workload curves along the time-of-day and show that bandwidth saving happens in almost 60% of all hours of the day. We compare our pricing scheme with others reported in the literature and the simulation results show the potential of our proposal.