
Ask HN: What does good look like for an ISP? - simonjgreen
I&#x27;m on the verge of going live with a new venture which as an ISP.<p>(We&#x27;re in the UK, and for those not in the US you may not be aware that the ISP market in the UK is heavily regulated to facilitate competition. For detail, Google for the history of Openreach)<p>At the moment my existing business is a content ISP, which means we have racks in DCs serving content to the world on behalf of customers. What I&#x27;m about to launch is an access ISP, which is the other side of the coin: providing connectivity to end users. This means that network etc is already in place, and I&#x27;ll be using the other half of the duplex.<p>I have a pretty good idea what good looks like in this space, but I also want to avoid both wasting my time on unnecessary and also missing something valuable.<p>So, I&#x27;m asking HN: what does good look like for an ISP to you? What differentiates the best from the worst? What services should they supply? What services shouldn&#x27;t they supply? How do you want to pay? DHCP vs static vs ppp? IPV6? DNS? NTP?<p>For a little more context, this is a B2B venture and pure fibre.
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toyg
I’m in the UK too. My tuppence, after working with a number of companies big
and small (and huge):

\- reliability, reliability, reliability. It doesn’t matter if your network is
superfast at 3am in the morning if it doesn’t stay up properly at 2pm because
Americans come online; I will always just note the latter.

\- most businesses would love to get a prepackaged vpn solution that works
with little fuss and supports a lot of different devices. They should also be
able to turn it off if they later move on to some other product.

\- make it super-easy to associate a server name to an IP, and have it
reachable from the entire network. That’s what most people care about, from
their networks.

\- ignore basic mail services, Office365 and GMail are unbeatable. But you can
offer admin services, like managing O365 for them, making regular backups and
so on.

In my book, the best ISP is the one that gives me simple tools for the most
common tasks, offers tons of reliability, and gets out of the way. For others,
it will be the one they can call and tell “make it so”.

The worst is always the one where you have to fill some Word document with
complex network details you don’t know anything about, just to open port 80
for machine X. Nobody likes bureaucracy.

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simonjgreen
Thanks for the feedback :)

Based on the comment about firewalls and VPN, would you prefer to be given a
router/fw then? (as opposed to a wires only service)

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toyg
A lot of customers will want the full service, yes.

