From August 1996 KCCS has moved to negociate fixed price monthly connection charges for its business customers.

Since late July in extended discussions with existing business customers and ISPs (there are about 12 ISPs connecting to KCCS), agreements have been reached with all on a fixed price for services. These prices have been negociated individually with each customer but have been loosely related to the average volumes of data that have been moved over the preceeding three months

The most difficult part of this exercise has been to arrive at agreed rates with ISPs. The ISP market is being squeezed almost daily on price. ihug have been acknowledged leaders in providing low price flat rate connections. Xtra have moved time charging prices to a level that will make life extremely difficult for other time charging ISPs. IBM have quietly followed in reducing their hourly rates.

KCCS has been a customer of Netway until this month although additional bandwidth has been available via two private international DDS links to supplement the service from Netway. These links at 64Kbit and 128Kbit have enabled KCCS to maintain reasonable response times for traffic when the Netway International link has been well overloaded. This tends to occur around 9pm daily and in general the situation is not improving as Netway cannot get sufficient bandwith quickly enough to cope with ever increasing user demands.

With these new flat rate prices charged by KCCS the ISPs connected to KCCS can now expand their services to use more of the bandwidth capability of their DDS, radio or ISDN links. Flat rates will be reviewed every 3 months in conjunction with increases in KCCS's international bandwidth. This is currently 1Mbit over three separate connections.
By December 1996 this is expected to be between 1.5Mbits and 2Mbits, again spread over at least three different international bandwidth providers.