Wireless Service Providers → Not at that price!

That's just a way of saying I have deeper pockets and they are sticking their hand in it. It is no different than all the other residential installs off the same AP. In fact, I use less bandwidth than most any home. I don't have any SLA or CIR/CDR. As for the cost of the SM, they can have the old one back so it's just a trade.Back when I had a fractional T1 for my WAN link, it was nowhere near double the cost to double the bandwidth.

Everywhere else that I priced bandwidth, the more you bought, the cheaper it was per mb provided the infrastructure existed and didn't need to be built out. Back when I had a fractional T1, Bell wanted me to give them $100,000 to upgrade their CO so that I could get a 100 meg LAN extension to a sister mill. The fibre run at the other end was not included in the price.

To put this back into perspective, we are only talking about increasing from 5 meg to 10. Many ISPs would do that at no cost just to keep their subs if'n when their competition start offering higher speed packages. Locally a residential sub could get Shaw's 250/15 with 1TB data cap for less than what this 10/3 Canopy service is asking per month. Tell me how that is fair?

You still haven't told us how much you are paying. 2x $100 is one thing, 2x $1k is completely different.

You are reselling the connection for all intents and purposes. It is moot that you are not doing it for a profit. Many ISP's wouldn't even allow you this luxury.

Plus, once you saturate the uplink of a Canopy AP the AP is done. Doubling the capacity of your uplink may be something they don't want to do and something they at least have to take into consideration.

They may not deploy non-advantage SM's anymore and one can only speculate if they have to purchase one new to accommodate your requirements.

Offer to provide your own equipment and see what happens.

How much I pay is irrelevant. Prices vary greatly by region. I gave a local comparison with 250/15 being cheaper.

While there are a few WISPs on this forum that are concerned about how much their subs consume, most don't even blink if a sub uses 30 gig a month. So why is it that just because this is a business account that I should pay so much more despite using much less than most residential subs?

You guys are as thick as thieves to justify the hand in my pocket.

The WISP that is my provider is not a mom and pop operation. They have hundreds of POPs subsidized by millions in government handouts. Mind you, the tower that I am on is in town so that one wasn't subsidized. They have fewer than 20 subs on that AP so I very much doubt that an extra 1.5 meg upload would kill the AP.

Chances are, if my old P8 1X SM were to die a natural death, they would replace it with a newer 2X and I'd get the faster speed with no change in billing. The greedy CRM would not even know. It is just because I asked for the speed increase that the greedy CRM wants to stick his hand in my pocket.

Anyway... I think this thread is done. When I get my E10, I'll cancel this Canopy service, take down this hotspot, and move my guests over to my Cisco guest portal. The money I won't be paying the WISP will buy me more Cisco LWAPs.

You are accusing them of price gouging and yet you won't specify what that is.

How can anyone render an opinion with incomplete data?

Depending on how the AP is set, yes an additional 1.5meg could absolutely saturate the AP.

Pull your head out of the sand.

I pay one price for the subscription and then I pay additional per IP for two static IPs. They not only want to double the subscription price, they also want to double what I pay for the two static IPs.

How can that not be greed?

I've given this WISP a fair amount of business with commercial subscriptions to what was three of our hydro dams. We have since sold those dams but the new owner still uses them. In fact the new owner gave them additional business to their offices. I even lent them one of my IPs through the transition and tunneled them through my hotspot. I have two other subscriptions in addition to my hotspot. I should get a volume discount, not their hand in my pocket.

still dancing around the question

No, I am not. The WISP knows what I use this for. I am not doing anything underhanded or outside of the agreed terms of service.

I am not going to say how much I pay for reasons already stated. Suffice to say, it is close to what I was paying Bell for BID service which BTW, did come with a SLA, a CIR/CDR, 5 static IPs, separate tech support, and reporting. I gave up a lot of that to get one extra meg of upload.

At the time, I thought I was going to get 10/3 like I do at my home. I've gotten one BS excuse after another and finally caught them in an outright lie which I confronted them on. I don't think I earned any brownie points with the CRM and he is now exacting his revenge.

The last laugh will be mine. I've said all I want.

You are still reselling the connection. Be it in the TOS or not, that's not the point. You are reselling the connection.Then why bother posting in the first place? You haven't given any of the information you were asked, so why bother posting. You want help/advice or do you just want a shoulder to cry on. If you came here for the latter, you came to the wrong place.

Why are you so fixated on that? I am not taking business away from the WISP. My guests are laptop users in the bowels of the complex that cannot get any other service and have no alternative but to go back to their hotel to use internet there.Why are you so fixated on what price I pay? I gave two relative examples. One being a business DSL that has a TOS allowing what I do albeit technically unable to deliver more speed. The other residential cable service is cheaper but at 250/15 is way way faster. Granted, the TOS would not allow me to use it but it is still a valid comparison since I use nowhere near the one TB cap their service allows.

As I said, you guys are as thick as thieves trying to justify your hand in my pocket. None of you have been able to give me a valid reason why I should pay so much more than a residential sub that consumes way more than me.

I guess that's your opinion. Sometimes the perspective is a bit different from the other side of the table. I think the requests for info about how much you were paying were valid requests. Without it, how are we supposed to know whether or not the prices sound reasonable?

I'm not trying to say that they are right or wrong for charging you what they do. Different businesses operate differently. Since bandwidth is one of the biggest costs for my business, if one of my customers wants twice the bandwidth, they pay twice the price since my costs will go up too. However many ISP's who have access to cheaper bandwidth than I and only charge incremental differences. Obviously if you only factor in the costs of thier wholesale bandwidth, the cost to provide double the bandwidth isn't twofold, but once you add in the limited capacity of each AP and the costs to upgrade infrastructure, it might be perfectly fair to charge twice as much.

I also don't have any caps, so I'm not going to give someone a special price just because they say they consume less bandwidth. They could easily double their consumption, and it isn't a risk I am willing to take. My prices are my prices. If I give one person a break, then word will spread and everyone else will want a discounted rate.

Regarding equipment, I personally don't charge for equipment. It is considered loaned. But I'm also not using $600+ CPE's. If I were, I would have to charge someone. Whether or not charging you the full price is fair or not isn't really up for me to decide. I don't believe you ever told us if you offered to buy your own equipment and provide it. I personally wouldn't support customer purchased equipment, as it can easily turn into more of a headache than it is worth, but some people do.

All I'm trying to say is that you are pretty much at the mercy of your provider and their policies. If they don't fit your needs, then you need to look for another provider. In many of our cases, there wasn't another provider which is what caused us to start our WISP's in the first place, and many of us are too small to dump hundreds of dollars into upgrades, and even if the customer is paying more for the faster connection, many times it is simply offsetting the increased costs of bandwidth and tower capacity.

I know this isn't the answer you want to hear, but it is the explanation I would give any of my customers if they were in your situation.

Joe, I do thank you for your honest feedback and I do fully understand that a small WISP would pay more for bandwidth and have to pass the cost on. Would you also double what you charge for the two static IPs and if so how would you justify that.

I have provided enough detail for anyone to determine that their AP is very lightly loaded and that in no way would a measly 1.5 mbps upload increase hurt them. The WISP retains ownership of the SMs and does not charge an install fee if a 3 year contract is signed. A 3 year contract will even get you a lower monthly fee.

Our company did not want to get into a multi-year contract so we paid a $300 install fee and pay the higher monthly fee on every sub. We've been paying this higher fee for many years on all of our subs.

I guess it depends. I charge $5/mo for a static IP. I've never had a customer request more than one IP or a whole block of them. I am only provided a /24 from my provider for my whole network, and once my tower equipment is addressed along with a small reserved block of addresses for future growth, that only leaves about 50% of the block remaining for customers, so they get a private IP unless they choose to pay for a public.

If someone wanted a small block, I guess I probably wouldn't charge $5 for each address that allocation took from my block. Maybe $5
for the first address and 50% of that for each additional which would be something like $22.50 for a block of 8 addresses. Hard to say exactly. I'll have to give it more thought if/when I find myself in that situation. If I had a virtually unlimited supply, I probably would just give each customer one public IP free of charge and charge only if they needed a block.

EDIT: I just realized what you were asking about doubling the price for the static ip's just for increasing your speed. No, I wouldn't change the price unless I had mistakenly way under-priced them in the beginning and was bleeding money on them and wanted to stop it, but in your situation, I would think that the price for the IP's would stay the same.

I looked up what Shaw would offer in a business account for less than what my WISP wants. Their Business Internet 50 offers 50/5 with 500 GB per month data. Even their Business Internet 25 would be a step up from what I have now and cheaper still.

Our industry is in severe decline right now so money is real tight. If I put through a purchase order for an increase it may get scrutinized and deemed to be an extravagant luxury we can do without. I could try to submit a PO to switch to Shaw and justify it as a savings but again, it could bring it to light as a luxury we can do without. Once this hotspot service falls under scrutiny, so too might the other subscriptions that I have with the WISP and they too could get cut.

My safest bet is to stay under the radar for now and to cancel the service once our E10 is in place.

I used to have a block of 5 with Bell. The reason I keep 2 is so that I can hot up a site-to-site VPN on short notice. I did that a few times for contractor trailers that were on-site. They were there for too short a term that any provider would setup an internet connection for. I also did it for H2O Power after we sold our hydro dams to them and the WISP was slow to turn up their service.

It burns me that I have to pay anything at all for the IPs since I have two /24 address blocks now but to use them I would need to get into a much higher class of service. I'm only using a half dozen of one of the /24 IP blocks now.