The Difference Between Do-It-Yourself and a Wholesale ISP Partnership
Many
ISP owners got into the facilities-based ISP business model during the
mid-1990s before virtual ISP technology and server-based ISP software
became a reliable solution. A facilities-based ISP owns its mail, DNS,
and authentication servers, switches, circuits, and other
infrastructure. As demand grew, the ISP owner had to purchase new
circuits to keep up. This was a double-edged sword because as demand
for dial-up declined, many ISPs have been stuck with termination
liabilities on circuits they were no longer using.
A
wholesale ISP or virtual ISP provider aggregates the volume of hundreds
ISPs. Each ISP offers Internet Services under their own company name
and sets their own prices, support policies, and manages their own
branding. It makes sense to partner with a company, such as visp.net (http://www.visp.net), that is highly specialized in providing back-office software and services for ISPs.
For
the facilities-based ISP owner, moving their back-office services to a
wholesale ISP means that they can now pay for services on a
per-subscriber basis with margin on each account. They’ve effectively
eliminated fixed costs and replaced them with variable costs that
provide a more sustainable business model in the highly dynamic
Internet access market.
The shift to a
wholesale ISP can be a significant upgrade of services because you are
leveraging the multimillion-dollar R & D investment of your ISP
wholesaler. The result: greater subscriber retention, and a service
that’s more attractive to prospective customers.
Knowing When It’s Time to Change
While
working with hundreds of ISPs over the past decade who have reached
this crossroad, I’ve identified a few “Red Flags” that signal it’s time
to partner with an ISP wholesaler.
Here Are My Top 5 Signs:
1. Unused circuits are sucking your profit margin dry.
It’s the Catch-22 of the facilities-based ISP world. You’ve got just
the right amount of subscribers and circuits. You’re finally in the
black and begin to show a profit. Life is good. But just when you start
making money, along comes that one additional subscriber and you either
send the subscriber to the competition or sign a contract for yet
another expensive circuit. On the other hand, you might have latent
capacity on existing dialup or DSL circuits. Either way, profit goes
out the window. By partnering with a wholesale ISP, owners pay only for
services that they need and use. Nothing more.
2. If you only have one qualified system administrator your head is in the sand.
The disastrous possibilities are real. We’ve worked with ISPs who’ve
lost their administrators to death, accidents and…even Microsoft. You
might not want to think about it, but it’s a cold, hard reality. A
qualified ISP wholesaler has the resources to maintain redundant
administration. Unexpected catastrophes are met with a team of
professionals while you enjoy your vacation or rest peacefully in your
bed.
3. Billing and administrative stresses make you want to pull your hair out.
New ISP services require new management interfaces. Just when you get
adjusted to one, subscribers start hammering on you about some new
service. It can become overwhelming. A good wholesale ISP vendor
offers a highly integrated solution that reduces stress. ISP in-a-box ®
management software from visp.net, for example, provides ISPs and their
staff with a consistent interface for administration, billing, and
management of all common ISP services, plus an interface that allows
subscribers to easily manage their own services without bothering you.
4. If a mission-critical server blew up today you’d be in a world of hurt.
You’ve heard stories of ISPs who’ve had a server go down, and lost
droves of customers. Often, these ISPs never recover. In this business,
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. However, designing and
maintaining your own highly reliable systems is very expensive and
requires significant administrative skill. By moving to a wholesale
ISP, such as visp.net, ISPs leverage existing engineering expertise and
layers of redundant architecture. Every mission-critical server is
RAIDed and mirrored to an identical RAID backup system. Typical uptime
exceeds the carrier-class gold standard of five nines or 99.999%.
That’s one less thing to keep you up at night.
5. There’s no future in simply maintaining or even losing subscribers.
Growing your ISP isn’t as easy as it used to be. Competition is
everywhere. You’ve got to be better, and potential customers need to
know about you. As a local ISP you have significant advantage over
national competitors, but when you’re busy managing everything else,
when do you have time to grow your subscriber base? By partnering with
a wholesale ISP, you can provide your subscribers with the quality of
service offered by national competitors, such as 24-hour support. When
you hand-off 24/7 administrative chores, you free up time to perform a
much more critical function - growing your ISP.
In
the end, the choice to leverage wholesale ISP software and technology
is a business decision. As the ISP business has become increasingly
dynamic, shrinking profit margins require ISPs to eliminate fixed
costs. There’s no more powerful way to cut your overhead and improve
your quality of life than by partnering with an experienced wholesale
ISP provider.
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