Australian ISP will Throttle you → Re: Speaking out of curiosity..

Yes, I work for hydrosoft.net and iceweb.net both small to mid ISP's currently in our PA location we are paying $1000.00 per month per 1.5 but in MD it's only $800. Depends on who you purchase or tier with. Their is a price war on now as Telco's are scambling to survive the death of all the small ISP's that used to pay big bucks for T-1 lines but are now dead or bought out. Thank god for porn, without the money they pay for bandwidth Telco's would be going broke! (and they are) Rather you do or don't look at porn it sure helps pay the bills cause things like Kazza sure as hell don't contribute to the cost of the internet expansion rather it cloggs it up. All you have to do is call around and price T-1 lines or T-3 lines from your local telcos or national carriers who intern pay each other to tier (hock) into each other. Somebody has to pay for the all those fiber and copper lines, the goverment doesn't. T-1, T-3, OC12 these are the types of circutes ISP's use not DSL or cable. God if the internet was made up of pooled bandwith (bridged) it would SUCK TO NO END!!! Fun thing to do. To people who live close to each other (like same block) and both have cable, do network browse and see each other then map drive and transfer files, see everyone in neighborhood's bandwidth SUCK, cable nodes are bridges, the bandwith is caped at the head end not at the nodes, you can transfer at around 10mb and up to each other. DO NOT DO THIS FOR LONG AS IT IS NOT FAIR TO YOUR NEIGHBORS. Some cable systems equipment prevent this alittle but most it works fine may have to play with it awhile to get it working.

Hey pawireless,

You didn't answer the first part of my question, and I'm not convinced by your answer to the second. The fact that the ISPs you work for pay out the nose for bandwidth doesn't mean that this is true on average for ISPs. I rather doubt that AOL, MSN, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Earthlink and the telcos, which together provide well over half of all internet connections, pay anywhere close to that.

As Magicalpig said earlier, "Can you document these claims? This is not a flame, I'd like some verifiable numbers."

I am part owner of a midsized ISP and I can verify that the the numbers that pawireless quotes are accurate. Average cost for quality BB are about $500.00 a Megabit. They start to fall when you get beyond the 30 Megabit range, but not by that much. Besides even if AOL or MSN did get a price break for their size, they have infrastructure and employee costs that are higher than a small ISP.

I'm very unclear on the economies of scale here. From what I've read in this thread and a few others, mid-size ISPs are buying bandwidth in the form of T1s for $500-$1000/month. I wonder what the bandwidth costs of an AT&T or a SBC are. I imagine they are somewhat less - I really don't know and would like to.

I also wonder how small-medium ISPs can compete with the price/bandwidth ratio offered by the huge ones, and why they try. The business model seems flawed - the profit margins on a $30/mo DSL connection must be incredibly thin and I can't imagine how it would be worth the trouble for a small ISP to offer this.

That's the magic. Small ISP's can't compete on price, there is no way. Even if we tried, the big boys would just undercut us to death. When we are all gone, they would just set the price high enough to discourage new ISP's from starting up. But there is a small army out there who realize that price isn't everything. You get what you pay for.

When a new client calls me up and is price shopping me with Verizon or MSN, I encourage them to call Verizon (or MSN) and sign up with them. We cannot beat them on price, but we kick the crap out them on customer service.

(Now all you VOL/MSN tech's, don't get your panties in a bunch, I know you are doing the best you can, but you are faced with an impossible task. Your companies are trying hard to attract the cheap end of the market, lots and lots and lots of low budget customers who are impossible to deal with. This is not a shot at you guys/gals).

We do DSL in both Qwest and Verizon territory. Our minimum DSL service is 256/256 from Qwest and the charge is $21.95 to Qwest and $40.00 to the ISP. That service includes IP addresses, firewall service, 5 e-mail boxes, DNS and 1000MB of traffic per month. Our customers come to use because we actually know the difference between CIR and CPR. We can give you a BGP feed if you like, and we don't confuse DNS and DHCP. I've had long time clients tell me, "You can pry my ISP from my cold dead fingers".

Yes they pay $40.00, $50.00, $100.00 even $300.00 for a DSL, and they are happy to do so because we treat them like gold.

How often have you called your ISP to say, "I just called to say you guys are the best!" We get Chocolate, Wine, Cards, Gift certificates and yes even nice phone calls to just say thanks.

Well, I'm not looking for an ISP to be my new best friend. I simply want reliable high-speed Internet service that I can use whenever I want for as long as I want at a reasonable price.

What happens when a DSL customer calls you because their DSL modem has lost sync, or there's another telco line connectivity problem? Now your customer service is dependent on Verizon's or Qwest's customer service to you... and you're "just another customer."

- Dan

unfortunatly it seems like the whole problem is connecting... sounds dumb but think about it, who is getting nailed? the people buying the backbone access.

Look at how well networks in far eastern countries are doing.. They have insane bandwidth and low prices, absolutely none of that is possible with hardware vendors wanting ridiculous amounts of money for simple equipment the way they do. that and it seems the the people with the bandwidth are the ones killing the internet, the big bells spend all that money raked in from bandwidth sales on themselves instead of turning it around to expand and connect. they are all about keeping as much for themselves and that is why we never see the bandwidth that our isp's are paying for..

correct me if im wrong but how hard is it to just link isp's to eachother? why do they all want to host their own small version of the internet and refuse to touch the competitions networks. bandwidth should be open and interconnected, not touch and go and broken apart into a billion small networks that are patched together here and there.

seems like all the rest of the world has it and we dont, doesnt it.

It is working really well so far.

When they have lost sync, the first thing I do is have them reboot their DSL modem (all my customers are external). If that fails I call Qwest/Verizon directly on behalf of the customer. Because I do this more often than the customer (2-3 times a month) I am more familiar with the process. The tech's are happy to work with me because I can cut to the chase pretty quickly and I don't treat them like horse pucky. When we need the customer I will conference them in and we will continue to trouble shoot. 60%-70% are fixed by resetting the card in the DSLAM. Some require a tech visit to the site, but very few take more than 24 hours, maybe 3-4 a year.

It's too bad that a small ISP has such a hard time making it these days. We're told there's a glut, but apparently the dirt-cheap bandwidth is only available on a large scale and only the big boys can take advantage of it. I wish I knew more about costs - supposedly there are hundreds of thousands of miles of dark fiber to be leased cheap.

My objection is that if this trend continues, an AT&T or Earthlink, whose bandwidth costs amount to less than 5% of a subscriber's monthly charge on average, might decide to limit users to 2G/mo, with some ridiculous charge like $8/G for overuse.

It may sound appealing: if the profit margin on a DSL line is 5% then an ISP could maybe increase profits 100% by eliminating the 20% of subscribers using 70% of the bandwidth. But it's only a short-term boost, I claim, because power users do more than just suck up bandwidth. They recommend to their friends and families the ISP they use, and often these are email+web only users. Power users are also active on forums such as this one, and they're not afraid to say what they think of an ISP. It's not clear that it's beneficial in the long-term for an ISP to get rid of them.

On the subject of p2p, I think Napster did more for broadband and the computer industry in general than p2p-haters acknowledge. I know a number of people for whom Napster was the impetus to get broadband, who become proficient with computers as a direct result of their involvement with Napster, and who are now pretty tame broadband users. To dismiss p2p as a scourge on the broadband world is short-sighted; p2p has been a driving force in the computing industry over the last two-and-a-half years and continues to be so now.

P2P created a huge demand for bigger hard drives, more RAM, faster processors and faster CDRWs. Necessity is the mother of invention. Do you really think 120GB 7200 RPM drives at less than $200 would exist today without Napster? I don't.

If I were limited to 2GB/month, or even 5GB/month (I'm on AT&T), my overusage bill would come to like $1000/month. I'll just get a leased T1 line, thanks. No limits there.

AOL's and MSN's infrastructure and employee cost Will be higher in total dollars, but I can almost Guarantee that their per user cost is less than 75% of yours.