
Ask HN: Any Pros to Commercial ISP for a Consumer? - chucksmash
See comment below.
======
Nextgrid
I am using a commercial ISP since over a year ago now. ~400/month and 2,5k
install which was covered by a government grant for small businesses.

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.

------
chucksmash
Context: I'm a somewhat privacy conscious consumer. I opt out of "useful
personalization" as much as possible. I find it gross that my ISP looked at
all the other companies out there monetizing my data and thought they'd get in
on the action too ("Hey, cool, let's inject unique IDs as headers!"). ISPs
have never been my favorite companies (e.g. before the adtech epoch, the
historical surfeit of games around introductory pricing, the "threaten to
cancel" song and dance for achieving price discrimination, deals disallowing
usage of some sites without users proving they also have a cable subscription,
etc).

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.

~~~
jjcinaz
Don't try and share the "shared line". All internet feeds are shared -- you
never have a dedicated link from your machine to the server. However, their
"shared line" means that they know you will, 99.99% of the time, never use
anything close to 1Gbps, so you are probably not close to a 10Gbps+ line. The
"dedicated line" is probably closer to a 10Gbps+ feed.

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.

~~~
Nextgrid
> 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.

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).

