AAISP Ideas
All the ideas and discussions
Your admin web pages (priceless/clueless) are massively powerful, but also massively complex.
Although technically you are the best ISP, I cannot recommend you to my family because they can't understand the web interface. They find it really hard to do basics like billing and "am I going to go over bandwidth quota".
I suggest:
1) The split between separate technical login and accounting login may be useful for some companies, but it adds complexity. You should make it an OPTION. By default people should have one account for everything, which they can log in using their email address and a password.
2) Make a new set of web pages to get access to the basics. When you log in, the main page should show:
- Last bill amount, date, link to full bill, plus either date paid, or payment due date (if not DD) or planned DD date.
- For Home::1: Bandwidth used and allowance for current month, in GB
- For Home::1: What the next bill will be if you don't use any more bandwidth
- For Home::1: A prediction of if your usage limit will run out, and when, if you keep using bandwidth at the same rate.
- For Home::1: A Top-Up button
- For unit-based tariffs: Allowance, usage, and remaining, all measured in units and GB. (E.g. "Allowance for this month is 3 units (7.5GB peak or 150GB off-peak). You have used 2 units (2.5GB peak and 50GB off-peak), so you have 1 unit left (equivalent to 2.5GB peak or 50GB off-peak).
- For unit-based tariffs: Say what time is peak/off-peak.
- For unit-based tariffs: What the next bill will be if you don't use any more bandwidth.
- For unit-based tariffs: Predicted bill if you keep using bandwidth at the same rate.
- Link to a page with all past billing information
- Link to "technical information" - current ADSL speed, IP addresses, router login details, etc.
- Link to bandwidth usage history - this should show monthly usage (split into peak/off-peak if applicable), and more fine-grained data for the last month, so they can figure out where their bandwidth is being used (and which housemate is doing it!). Ideally should include pretty graphs. However, if you're going to do FireBrick-style graphs, please simplify them to just show download usage - for this purpose, upload data and latency measurements are just confusing. In fact, do not mention upload usage anywhere on any of these pages, since it's not metered and can only confuse people.
- Link