BellSouth Products

BellSouth BEST ISP Overall Satisfaction

Overall Customer Satisfaction
BellSouth.net received the best grade for overall satisfaction, based on percent of total possible score each ISP received.

top of page

Connection Type
More than two thirds of respondents have either a T1 or dial-up connection

top of page

Important Qualities When Selecting An ISP
Scale ranges from 5 (extremely important) to 1 (unimportant)

top of page

Serious About Satisfaction
Survey Results (Charts) cont..
By Carol Wilson, Rebecca Wetzel and Max Smetannikov, Inter@ctive Week
December 13, 1999 9:15 AM ET

Network Performance
UUnet Technologies' mean satisfaction rating beat the competition.

top of page

How Customers Rate Their ISPs
This chart shows how ISPs stack-up in customer satisfaction in key categories. Scores represent a 1 to 20 ranking, with 1 being the best in each category.

top of page

Percent Likely* To Switch ISPs
MCI Worldcom customers are most loyal, while almost half of Netcom users are contemplating a switch.

*Extremely or somewhat likely to switch

top of page

Serious About Satisfaction
Billing Systems Become Strategic Tools For ISPs
By Carol Wilson, Rebecca Wetzel and Max Smetannikov, Inter@ctive Week
December 13, 1999 9:15 AM ET

Back in the days when the $19.95 customer subscription model was the only game in town, all Internet service providers needed to do billing was a good Radius server. Some engineers and quite a few chief financial officers must miss these days bitterly. In an environment of ever-escalating competition among ISPs, customized billing solutions are looked upon as the next big thing. This brings the ISP community to the point where long-distance players were in the mid-1980s, when MCI Communications turned the business on its ear by launching its

"Friends and Family" program, which drew on a flexible and robust billing system to create a marketing firestorm.

The problem with such marketing ploys in today's ISP community is that most carriers selling data services don't have adequate billing platforms to support such initiatives.

The race is on to deploy these systems, an endeavor that often costs upward of $2 million and takes up to two years. And time is running out. Most carriers competing in both consumer and business markets are getting close to the launch date of new billing platforms, with some just six months away.

This is good news for users of Internet access and related services. Switching from one carrier to another is becoming easier every day, both for businesses and individuals. In the end, the same price wars that today are waged by long-distance telephone companies will soon hit online users.

The difference will be that there are more services online than there ever were in the voice world, and the service lineup is constantly changing, which makes choosing a billing vendor an arduous task for most carriers. Indeed, how do they know if the multimillion-dollar, hard-to-install software they are buying today will be able to support the killer app of tomorrow?

Most access providers keep their perception of where the Internet service market will be in three years in mind when they make the investment, even as they view the more pressing goal of developing Internet "bundles."

"I think the key here is to have a system to bring a product to market really fast," says Carlos Escaffi, director of billing and financial systems at OneMain.com.

OneMain.com is a good example of an ISP with a well-defined billing strategy. Based in Reston, Va., the carrier got started as a rollup venture that consolidated the resources of 26 regional ISPs. Positioned as a national ISP with a small hometown focus, OneMain.com is concentrating its marketing efforts on secondary and tertiary markets.

Execution of this strategy largely depends on OneMain.com's ability to lower its nationwide expenses for regional ISPs to benefit fully from their national affiliation. Unification of billing platforms is seen as a critical step in that direction. "You have to have tools to grab market data from different places and then use it to predict things like consumer behavior," Escaffi says.

Escaffi's "tools" include a billing software suite from Kenan Systems, which was recently acquired by Lucent Technologies. Escaffi is also closely eyeing a network intelligence probe from Xacct Technologies that would allow him to get billable information from various network elements such as routers and servers.

All 26 ISPs are slated to be integrated into one billing system by the end of next year, at which time the company could start running specials for both consumer and business customers. Escaffi also envisions free services for power users and referral programs.

The strategic goal that Escaffi and OneMain.com are trying to achieve is readiness to provision new services in real-time and modification of billing plans on a whim. Other carriers appear to be after the same level of flexibility. A case in point is Global Crossing, an international Web hosting, voice and network service behemoth that is taking its chances by storming the nascent application service provider (ASP) market.

"I think all ASPs eventually would migrate to a usage-based billing scenario, because otherwise, what are you going to charge customers for CPU [central processing unit] utilization?" says Paul Santinelli, Global Crossing's GlobalCenter vice president of technology and applications. GlobalCenter is the company's Web and application hosting arm.

Global Crossing is spending slightly less than $3 million to get its billing infrastructure in place in the next eight months. Santinelli says Portal Software is the company's billing platform of choice, and Global Crossing is looking closely at Narus as the preferred probe vendor.

"Billing's biggest problem today is that nobody can actually do usage-based billing," Santinelli says. The challenge that Global Crossing is facing is more profound than OneMain.com's. Not only would Global Crossing want to run promotions across different services, it would like to bill individual services differently.

In other words, while some ISPs would be satisfied knowing how much bandwidth or CPU power individual users burn for specific services - such as Internet Protocol telephony, Web hosting or plain access - Global Crossing needs to know which users are using which applications for how long. As a result of such intelligence gathering, Global Crossing would be able to provide its customer with a bill itemizing time spent on the Net on a service-by-service basis. It would also be able to charge differently for e-mail and services such as videoconferencing.

The fact that companies such as OneMain.com and Global Crossing got around to considering probes from Xacct and Narus is a breakthrough in itself. Launched in early 1998, both Xacct and Narus seemed to run well ahead of the curve with their solutions for almost 18 months, with few takers.

"While the cycle took a little bit longer than we expected, it is beginning to pick up now. People get it now" says Mark Stone, Narus' president and chief operations officer.

While there are still a lot of bugs to work out, preparations by young ISPs that have little or no legacy infrastructure - such as OneMain.com - and by carriers that are experimenting with new business models - such as Global Crossing's GlobalCenter ASP plunge - clearly indicate that customers might start seeing usage-based itemized bills by the end of next year.

This development puts a lot of pressure on carriers that are operating old networks and have an existing investment in a billing infrastructure. The hardest ones to adapt to the new world order would be, ironically, the very companies that have first introduced incentive programs and service-based billing in the telephone world: giants such as AT&T, Cable & Wireless, MCI WorldCom and Sprint.

Cable & Wireless, for instance, is in the midst of converting the entire company to the same billing platform - incidentally, also provisioned by Kenan.

"We are not there yet," says Gian Dilawari, Cable & Wireless' vice president of systems and technology services. "Our goal is to achieve a single customer view across the entire company, and I think Cable & Wireless will spend more money this year than over the past three to achieve this goal."

Realistically, total billing convergence could happen next year for Cable & Wireless USA, Dilawari says, but could take longer for the global operation because of its sheer size. Nevertheless, Cable & Wireless might pursue bundled offerings before too long. Denny Matteucci, the company's former chief executive, mentioned before his exit that he realistically sees a possibility of offering free voice services to large buyers of data services. Long-term, however, Cable & Wireless might shy away from metered services.

"Why should we go after usage? I think it's too complex to set up," Dilawari says. "I think there is more money in billing per e-commerce-like transaction."

To that end, Cable & Wireless is beta-testing a device from Xacct. The only usage-based data services that Cable & Wireless sells today are tiered bandwidth plans, standard across the industry. Level 3 Communications, UUnet Technologies and other carriers also sell those.

All this activity is catching the attention of large vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM that are looking into delivering complete billing solutions as well. HP is probably further along than most vendors in the ISP space, having launched its Smart Internet Usage product in 1996. For now, HP has only one carrier that agreed to be identified as a customer: Australia's Telstra.

"In our sales cycle, we have found that the product is being used first for analysis; once carriers analyze the data, they can use it to change billing strategies," says Dushyant Sukhija, HP's director of marketing for Internet infrastructure operation.

While carriers that buy Smart Internet Usage are seeking mainly business intelligence for capacity planning and fraud management, Sukhija says the tide is changing toward carriers looking to launch new billing strategies. Telstra, he says, bought a broadband version of Smart Internet Usage that would enable it to merge customers' telephone bills with Internet services bills.

"The bottom line is that the ability to meter the Internet is fundamental to any service provider business," Sukhija says.

top of page

© 2000
eICEPower
525 Technology Park, Suite 109, Lake Mary, FL 32746
Phone: 800-229-2881
e-mail: sales@eicepower.com