On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Nick Ryberg wrote:
> In a crazy way, this might be a sort of odd little entrepenuer
> opportunity - get together with 2 other people in your neighborhood -
> split the $2100 cost for a startup AP + 3 subscriber units, and split
> the cost of DSL to the AP. Hmmm... it's still darned expensive for a
> normal user to get it up and running.  But once, you got over the
> hump, and had five or six other people sharing the costs, it'd
> probably be a money maker.

Remember -- reselling DSL is a risky business.

For one, most cheap DSL accounts (ie, Real Time's TCLUG program) are for
non-commercial use only, and any resale is prohibited. In our case, if
there's not a ton of traffic through the line, we don't actively go see if
the line's being used for commercial use. If it's sucking a ton of
bandwidth, though, and we see it's commercial, it'll cause problems.

Also, Qwest DSL circuits are just about their lowest repair priority, or
so I've been told (even below home voice circuits).

Only way I'd be comfortable reselling DSL is if it came from someone like
Covad (SDSL), but since Covad's on shaky grounds.. *shrugs*.

Reselling RR Business Cable's an option; I don't recall if they prohibit
resale, but I know someone running a (small) web hosting business off it.
Reliability is pretty good (from my monitoring, well above 99% uptime over
the last 6 months), and the price is $99/mo for 1mb symmetrical. That
includes 16 IP's, too. But there's also many places that are AT&T land
instead of RoadRunner.

Best bet would probably be to make a deal with a large provider to get
T1's at a discount rate. Chances are we couldn't get them much cheaper
than $900/mo for a full T1 (including local loop), though.. takes a whole
lot of subscribers to cover that cost. And, again, we'd HAVE to limit
customer's bandwidth.. let's say $45/mo per user, that's 20 users to cover
the cost, so the users can't expect to each be getting T1-ish speeds. Of
course, if you've got users used to RoadRunner, a T1 is going to seem
slow, too.

> I can take this offline if people think it's way off-topic and too
> commercial for TCWUG.

I like it, let's keep it.  :)

-- 
Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com>   | Phone : (952)943-8700
http://www.real-time.com                | Fax   : (952)943-8500