The Problem with Always-On IoD Pricing
Internet-on-Demand (IoD) is billed by the hour at whatever bandwidth tier your circuit is currently ordered at. If you provision a 1 Gbps circuit and never change it, you pay the 1 Gbps hourly rate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — including nights, weekends, and holidays when utilization is often below 10%.
This is the core inefficiency that bandwidth scheduling solves.
How IoD Hourly Billing Works
Every hour, your IoD provider records your current ordered bandwidth tier and bills accordingly. The billing is based on what you ordered, not what you used. A circuit sitting at 1 Gbps overnight costs the same as one running at full capacity during peak hours.
IoD tiers typically range from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps. The price difference between a 100 Mbps tier and a 1 Gbps tier can be substantial — and scheduling your circuit to drop to the lower tier during off-peak hours can eliminate a significant portion of your monthly bill.
A Real-World Example
Consider a circuit that runs at 1 Gbps during business hours (8am–6pm, Monday–Friday) but only needs 100 Mbps overnight and on weekends.
- • Business hours: 50 hours/week × ~52 weeks = ~2,600 hours/year at 1 Gbps
- • Off-peak: ~6,160 hours/year at 1 Gbps (current) vs 100 Mbps (scheduled)
If the hourly rate difference between 1 Gbps and 100 Mbps is even $0.50/hour, that’s $3,080 in annual savings from a single circuit — for software that costs $600/year.
The Right Way to Schedule IoD Changes
Manual scheduling through the provider portal is error-prone and time-consuming. Each change requires logging in, navigating to the circuit, submitting an order, and waiting for confirmation. For recurring changes — every weeknight, every weekend — this is unsustainable.
Automated scheduling through the NaaS API handles this programmatically. You define the schedule once: “Drop to 100 Mbps at 6pm weekdays, return to 1 Gbps at 7:45am.” The system submits the API order at the right time, every time.
What to Schedule First
Start with the highest-bandwidth circuits that have predictable off-peak windows:
1. Overnight windows — Most enterprise circuits can drop 70–90% overnight with zero business impact. 2. Weekends — Saturday and Sunday are often the biggest savings opportunity for B2B workloads. 3. Holiday windows — Schedule reduced tiers for known low-traffic periods.
Calculating Your Savings
Use the savings calculator on the Apptifi homepage to estimate your monthly and annual savings based on your current IoD spend and peak hours per day. Most customers see 30–40% bill reduction within the first billing cycle.
For a per-tier breakdown of Lumen IoD hourly rates and how the math actually pencils out, see [Lumen IoD Pricing: How Hourly Bandwidth Billing Works](/blog/lumen-iod-pricing-per-hour). If you also run Layer 2 EVCs, the same scheduling lever cuts [Lumen Ethernet on Demand](/features/ethernet-on-demand) costs by 30–50%.
The Apptifi Core plan starts at $50/month — for most circuits, the first month’s savings exceed the annual subscription cost.