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Xref: sserve comp.sys.powerpc:41608 comp.sys.intel:39005 comp.unix.bsd:16661 comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit:8655 comp.unix.sys5.r4:9864 comp.unix.misc:17449 comp.os.linux.development:24439 comp.os.linux.misc:49242 comp.os.386bsd.development:3340 comp.os.386bsd.misc:5710 comp.os.misc:4078 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.sprintlink.net!kaleka.seanet.com!news.seanet.com!not-for-mail From: kanefsky@datamagic.com (Steve Kanefsky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.powerpc,comp.sys.intel,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.sys5.r4,comp.unix.misc,comp.os.linux.development,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.development,comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.misc Subject: Re: X on dial-in Date: 24 Jun 1995 12:19:54 -0700 Organization: Data Magic Lines: 66 Message-ID: <3shogq$am8@datamagic.com> References: <3f44s2$jqm@maverick.maverick.tad.eds.com> <3sdgu2$5ii@park.uvsc.edu> <3seovd$a2s@datamagic.com> <3sf1ba$6ss@park.uvsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: kanefsky1.seanet.com In article <3sf1ba$6ss@park.uvsc.edu>, Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> wrote: >kanefsky@datamagic.com (Steve Kanefsky) wrote: > >Most ISPs charge on the order of half of what Sprint charges >for a T1 for a 56k line (at least in this area). I find this very difficult to believe. First of all, any ISP worth his salt (and certainly the ones I've been referring to) has at least two path-diverse T1's going to a T3 (or better) backbone, and they may be dedicated T1's and not frame-relay. I think they run into the thousands per month each, but even if they were 1/10 that it doesn't matter because that's actually a relatively small part of the total costs. The phone lines should be at least $1K/month as well, and I'll bet even the electricity bill is considerably more than $1K/month. Then there are support contracts on the equipment, etc. Assuming one tech support person for each 1000 customers, plus two sysadmins (on call 12 hours/day each) and a bookkeeper -- with wages, benefits, payroll taxes, insurance, office space, etc. -- I figure at least $300-400K a year to cover the people (you can basically double the base salary of each employee to get the total cost to the company). Another person or two could easily be required (perhaps a receptionist or an HTML author). Your equipment estimates are probably kind of low as well, at least for a decent ISP using a good rack-mount modem setup. My ISP uses the USR Total Control system, which is in the neighborhood of $1K/modem. They don't have to replace everything every year, but they did just get done upgrading all the modems to 28k (without raising prices), and they're always having to add new servers, upgrade them with faster CPUs, new disks and disk controllers, more memory, etc. Then there's the overhead of billing, business taxes (as opposed to the payroll taxes I mentioned already), and loans. Billing (either by mail or by paying Visa's cut) can easily take 1-2% off the top. I have no idea what the taxes on business are like, but I imagine they could easily take a double-digit percentage of the gross, if not much more. And since you generally need to buy the equipment before you can get the customers to use the equipment, no doubt there are loans to pay off, and a lot of money going to interest that takes away from profits. I don't doubt that a lot of ISP's make good profits, but in general I think profit margins are much tighter than a lot of other businesses, like software development or hardware manufacturing, and the risks are pretty great considering that no-one is quite sure what is going to happen to the Internet in the future in terms of how service is provided. So if you think an ISP is making you "bend over," you must think that everyone you buy anything from is making you bend over. The company you work for must feel like you're making them bend over, since 30 minutes of your time probably costs them more than most people pay for an entire month's worth of internet service, whereas there are people in Russia and India who probably work a lot harder than you for the tinyest fraction of what you make. Anyway, you can't really compare two services based purely on bandwidth any more than you can compare two computer systems based on the CPU. There are a lot of other factors that influence how much throughput you really get, how reliable the service is, etc. You have every right to complain about an ISP that tried to get by with a just one T1 that's not near to a backbone, cheap modems, not enough phone lines, low-quality tech support, etc. and still charged the same rates as a high-quality ISP. -- Steve Kanefsky