On Thu, 2002-08-15 at 15:25, David R. Meyer wrote:
> We all know that ISP's are out to make money...period. Who isn't. That
> also means that for the most part, we're all "hiding" when it comes to
> running our servers because companies like Time Warner get all hot and
> bothered when it comes to people running servers, etc and they can't collect
> their $10.00 per month per machine, or bump you up to business class
> service.
>
> I don't know what the costs would be, but what about the idea of building
> our own SLUG ISP? I'm serious. There are a few of us who have businesses
> that could get anything equipment wise, for everything else there is eBay.
> We could manage it on a volunteer bases or pay someone inside the group to
> man it. Proceeds would go to the project and back into the club.
>
> I know, it's a crazy idea, but perhaps there is something to this...
You have to have a LOT of customers to run an ISP in the black. It's
not the equipment that necessarily costs - you can build a decent
ISP-in-a-box with a couple of Linux PCs and a rackmount modem bank plus
whatever access equipment you need which you can probably get off ebay
cheap nowadays - it's the internet access.
T-1 and upstream provider will usually set you back at least
$couple-thousand a month and add on top of that the cost of enough
"business class" phone lines to service the number of customers who will
be dialed up at any given time. (And considering this group, you
probably wouldn't be able to get away with overselling your lines by at
least 10x as any reasonable ISP would do - you'd probably have to have
close to a 1:1 dialup/customer ratio.) Keep in mind that this is
MONTHLY recurring expense... not a one-time deal like the physical
equipment.
Divide those costs by the number of subscribers you have to find out how
much you need to charge each one every month just to break even.
(Unless you wanted to subsidise the costs by selling your users'
personal information to anyone who asked, which might bring in the bucks
for a month or two until you were caught out at which point you'd
probably lose all your customers if we're talking about SLUGgers who are
pretty aware of and against this sort of slimy behaviour.)
And I purposefully said "dialup" because you can forget about broadband
unless you have a LOT of customers and money to throw around.
Colocating DSL equipment or providing ISDN or using any other broadband
equipment is even more expensive, assuming you can even get the telcos
to cooperate anymore considering the latest rounds of decisions
regarding telco's responsibilities (or lack thereof) to provide access
to equipment and data centers to third-party service providers. There
are reasons (although not what I'd call "Good" reasons or "Fair"
reasons) why DSL companies have been dropping like fruit flies on
malathion....
--
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usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
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