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Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

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Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#31

Post by pavs »

piker wrote: post #4

Interesting read. It seems to me some of the long tail risks mitigated by expensive redundancies might be an acceptable risk for the customers. For example, the article indicates that they have redundant power suppliers, along with 2 days worth of diesel for on-premise generation. Apparently keeping the second power company available is a recurring cost. What are the chances power is cut to the office for more than 2…

Few things,

There are limits on how long you can keep your generators running without causing mechanical damage - hence two generators.

Redundant power company only charges for usage, there is a small recurring fee for connectivity. If Power goes out from one provider, online UPS kicks in - we switch to secondary power-company if there is a long downtime.This happens about 4-5 times a year - longest blackout was 12 hours to the best of my recollection.

When you provide internet service for SME, Banks, and some large-scale corps - redundancy and SLA plays a huge role. Home users benefit from this too.

I probably should have been more clear.

Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#32

Post by wjnc »

supergreg wrote: post #14
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #8

Starting an ISP doesn't have to be that hard at all. If you want to start one in the country where I live you could do so with very little investment. All the issues he talks about are due to the fact that there is no real competition in the US and no infrastructure to support competition. The way it works over here is that there is a (commercially owned) open fiber network which can be used by anyone who wants to, a…

What is this superb country you live in?

We can make it a little bit more awesome. Many adressess have both a fiber and coaxial cable coming in. Making it a broad competition between fiber and coax. The (only large) cable supplier is Liberty Global, which has responded by bringing quad play products to the market at a pretty good pricepoint. T-Mobile is in as well with quadplay via fiber, plus a lot of local offerings. Say, 60 euros gets you quad play for the family, with 100Mb+, some free online content and 4GB+ mobile data.

Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#33

Post by ac29 »

apercu wrote: post #27

I don't know if I agree with this. I cofounded an ISP in the mid-90's. It was in a relatively small town in a rural state in the midwestern US. I have no idea what the residents options for internet access are now, but at the time the only really choice (unless you were college faculty or a student) was AOL. But there wasn't a local line - you had to call a city 30 miles away that had a long distance toll charge. Tha…

In the article they mention they run 100km+ of their own fiber. They don't mention which country they are in, but in most of the US, this would be very difficult and expensive. The upside to old dialup ISPs is the local telco had built and was maintaining your last mile physical infrastructure.

Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#34

Post by throwaway2016a »

In the 90s there were ton of mom and pop ISPs. But in the 90s they piggy backed off of telephone lines (dial up) so they didn't have to have an infrastructure aside from running a high speed connection to their office and having a bank of modems connected to phone lines.

I remember there was even a company that let you "start your own ISP" with just a 10 minute sign up form. You used their high speed connection and their modem bank and they took 3/4 the profit.

Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#35

Post by ethbro »

baud147258 wrote: post #28
ataturk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at #1! The place all this went bad was when big cable and AT&T got into the game and flushed out all the rest of the competition. Comcast is a reprehensible company from top to bottom--the pricing sucks, cable tv sucks, bundling sucks, and their customer service SUCKS! So I won't do business with them and am relegated to crappy DSL from Frontier which also SUCKS, just not as bad as Comcast as a company. How…

If the Mom & Pop -- real American entrepreneurs -- had grew to national scale, would they have become robber barons? It is just a consequence of size or is more complex than that?

Publicly traded vs private. I.e. whether investors are okay with steady return or always pushing for profit growth.

Re: Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

#36

Post by apercu »

ac29 wrote: post #33
apercu wrote: post #27

I don't know if I agree with this. I cofounded an ISP in the mid-90's. It was in a relatively small town in a rural state in the midwestern US. I have no idea what the residents options for internet access are now, but at the time the only really choice (unless you were college faculty or a student) was AOL. But there wasn't a local line - you had to call a city 30 miles away that had a long distance toll charge. Tha…

In the article they mention they run 100km+ of their own fiber. They don't mention which country they are in, but in most of the US, this would be very difficult and expensive. The upside to old dialup ISPs is the local telco had built and was maintaining your last mile physical infrastructure.

Very true, but it's also easier today to rent space on some one else network in most municipalities, and to scale up without significant capital investment. On course, you're right in pointing out that it depends on where you are geographically.
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