Ask HN: Any Pros to Commercial ISP for a Consumer?
See comment below.
This turned out to be a very good call as I've heard of consumer ISPs having major problems early on due to the increased load caused by the pandemic while this one never broke and consistently provides me the advertised speed and I feel comfortable hosting services on it (it's in fact designed for that).
Support and account management wise, it has been great. I never have to talk to them, they never have a reason to talk to me (no upselling, "offers", or similar bullshit). I only once had an issue with packet loss to certain destinations, spoke directly to a network engineer (they respond to phones 24/7 and there is no music on hold or IVR) and they resolved it in a matter of hours.
They also have nothing to do with the media or advertising industry and have no reason to leak my info to advertising partners such as Facebook or credit reporting agencies. I am sharing this connection with several people and I'm assuming one is torrenting regularly because the old consumer-grade ISP would constantly send me scary reminders about it but these guys don't have any incentive to do that so it's another plus.
I look at residential ISPs offering Disney+ subscriptions, Apple Music subscriptions, Hulu subscriptions, etc, and - while I understand the draw for some - I consider "here, have a 'free' trial account for something you wouldn't have bought otherwise that helpfully auto-renews!" a definite negative. It's just another way companies can pay to get their foot through my door. In my ideal world, my ISP is a company that earns a healthy margin in exchange for making sure the dumb bit pipe that connects me to the world keeps working most of the time; continuing to earn that healthy margin is the height of their ambition, and a predictable monthly deduction from my bank account is the sum of our interaction.
I've seen advice in the past that buyers who want to avoid the "smart TV" tracking ubiquitous in consumer TV models should check out TVs that are marketed as commercial displays. This got me wondering: would similar logic hold up in picking a commercial ISP as opposed to a residential ISP?
There's a "small business ISP" in my area offering 1 Gbps symmetrical access for $250/mo for a shared line or $850/mo on a dedicated line + $750 installation.
Handwaving the building owner's permission here, it seems to me that $850/mo split eight ways between all the building tenants must yield a massively better load factor than residential ISPs give for a monthly price somewhere between the introductory price and the actual price for 200/100 Mbps Fios when I last had it in 2019.
I suspect we'd even come out ahead by splitting the $250/mo. Even one other tenant buying in would put the price in Fios territory. Doing $250/mo solo wouldn't necessarily be prohibitive either, but >$100/mo would be a pretty steep privacy premium.
My questions:
- Is anybody on HN using a commercial ISP at home today? If so, how has the experience been?
- Is my assumption - that independent commercial ISPs are less likely to bother with privacy invasive measures to wring out extra profit - a reasonable one?
- It seems like if one went through the trouble of doing this for one's own building on principle, one will have done most of legwork required to be able to repeat it N times. Does anyone have experience running a very small ISP? I could imagine this working quite well as a co-op model.
You didn't mention IP addresses, but you'll need some IPv4 addresses which aren't cheap any more. You'll need these because someone in your building will be downloading pirated movies or something more serious and you want to be able to prove that's not you.
You'll need to be able to answer calls for problems 7x24. People get all bent out of shape for some reason when their Internet goes down or their videos start pausing.
If you get a 1Gbps feed and you share that with 10 other people at 100Mbps each, you'll have no issues. If you share it with 10 other people at 200Mbps each, then you may have complaints when their speedtests don't hit 200Mbps every time they click it (and they seem to do that a lot as they don't understand that they are being sold a max not a min).
All this assumes that the contract with the provider allows your resale of the product and that you have a way to distribute the Ethernet in the building.
Finally, my ISP doesn't inject anything in to user sessions or use any other scummy tactics, but consumers don't care. They all seem used to trading their privacy for some perceived value. They want reliable Internet (few outages, no pausing in their video, good VoIP) and good support. Most will have issues with their WiFi which you'll figure out, suggest a WiFi solution for them, and then you're supporting it for all time.
There are many shared properties, coffee shops, hotels, etc that routinely share a single IP address between many people (and most just share from a consumer-grade connection & router so no local logging infrastructure) and I assume that if this was indeed a problem they would be in big trouble considering the likelihood of abuse you'd get on a public connection is much higher than one you share with people you know and have their details.
When it comes to reselling it there's no point in promising huge speeds; a 10Mbps worst-case scenario is still a very good deal for a lot of people (especially if it's cheaper than the current offerings) and they'd still be getting more than that on average. In my area for example a lot of people are paying ~40 bucks/month for very terrible DSL (6Mbps due to the quality of the wiring) where I could be profitable reselling 10Mbps slices at just 10 bucks a month.
> They want reliable Internet (few outages, no pausing in their video, good VoIP) and good support
A commercial-grade connection is typically more reliable (as they have their own SLA to uphold) and Ethernet equipment is very reliable. In the rare case that things break the "support" of just speaking to their neighbor and having him be on site and fix it on the same day is luxury compared to consumer-grade ISP "tech" support (tech in quotes because they are monkeys and have little to zero knowledge beyond reading a script).
I agree about the Wi-Fi though. A lot of people immediately blame the ISP for it (which in some cases is fair - in my country a big ISP is now advertising really fast Wi-Fi despite their equipment being consumer-grade crap and in some buildings a single access point will not be enough no matter how good it is) so you'll need to be upfront with your customers about it; maybe write some documentation about it, what kind of equipment they need to purchase and how they can test to determine whether the issue is the ISP or just bad Wi-Fi signal/equipment).