Adding a paywall for billing, but it isn’t about money
You may have heard the phrase, every time you scale up by a factor of 10 you have to fundamentally shift to continue growing? Its true.
When we approached the 1,000 subscriber mark, our old system for billing/records stretched beyond the breaking point. In 2023 we kicked off a transition to a billing platform made specifically for ISPs. I hired a full time admin to help. She has made a world of difference both in keeping on top of the billings and helping handle many of the basic service issues, leaving only the “problems” to the guys or myself. Part of the billing system is a feature that will redirect customers to a “what’s up?, your past due” page instead of their normal web browsing experience. I was pretty stoked about this as we were suffering from an embarrassingly large number of delinquent accounts. Ruby does such a good job being proactive and simply pleasant to deal with that our delinquent accounts has shrunk from nearly 100 to well less than 10. I told myself, you don’t need to annoy your customers with a paywall, things are fine, get around to it eventually.
The next factor of ten happened on 5/3/2025 at 9:30PM. I received a call from a Bainbridge police officer requesting assistance locating an address for a suicide in progress. I told the officer I had to check the information and to call back in a few minutes. I called 911 and challenged the request for information. CenCom (911) confirmed the officer badge and situation. Because we don’t have direct tracking of your router we have to call KPUD engineers to perform a physical address lookup. I lit up the personal phones of all the KPUD engineers around 9:40PM as nobody had responded to the email. One of KPUDs engineers jumped in and stuck with me until we found the address. However, fortunately?, it wasn’t one of my subscribers…
Last winter there was severe storm damage to a section of KPUD’s distribution and about 30 homes service drops severed in a cluster. KPUD rebuilt and all was fine, but two adjacent subscribers’ ports were swapped at the equipment five miles away from the damage. We figured it out eventually, but it took over an hour. As I write this note I am not sure if the police and paramedics arrived in time to save the young man’s life. I may never find out.
We are implementing the paywall function so we can map your IP address to your physical address solely in our systems. We must take the delay of manual work by KPUD and possibility of error out of the equation. The next time we are called upon by public safety officers we will be prepared to help save your or your loved one’s life.