I know many ceo's/owners/presidents of companies must think about offering dialup or dsl on their site as a service of theirs at least once a month.

I have seen some web sites in the past that do, but can obviously not be a ISP with their own data center and all.

Does anyone out there know of some ISP's that allow you to resell their services or have a program for allowing you to run your own ISP through them?

Thanks.

Thats a good question... I would like to know about this to.

affinity path doesnt cost anything to start it up.

I'll check with a friend of mine... he works for a local ISP, and they signed a contract with a national carrier so they can offer all of their clients nationwide dialup service. It only cost them about $5 per customer.

Originally posted by Jon FB
affinity path doesnt cost anything to start it up.

It didn't look all that professional to me, for a company to be using it.. the branding options didnt look all that great.. how'd it go with you if you're using them?

Originally posted by Jon FB
affinity path doesnt cost anything to start it up.

Does anyone know if there is anything like this in the UK?

You can check out Velocity West, http://www.velocitywest.com they offer wholesales ISP services for Dialup, Accelerated Dialup and ISDN, will even do the support for you as well on the dialup/customers. Lots of diffrent options you can choose.

There are a few that I'm aware of.

http://www.stargate.net (these guys are local to me, but service the entire U.S.)

and

AffinityPath

Try http://www.cari.net. I used them for a couple of years.

I used to see a member with this in their sig: http://www.yourownisp.com/

Originally posted by mpalamar
Try http://www.cari.net. I used them for a couple of years.

Why you stop using them?

Are they any good?

Anything bad about them?

Is there anything that is available for Canadians?

I have also been considering a new provider, which may interest some of you.

http://www.virtisp.net

Not sure if they provide to Canada though.

http://www.dialupusa.net

Anyone planning on getting into that business should give careful thought to the support issue. One approach is that the company you're reselling for may offer support to your customers as part of the deal. That brings with it some of the same problems that any outside support source does -- people are representing your company who do not answer to you, or know your company well. How do you know those support people are doing a good job, are polite to your customers, etc.

If you'll offer your own support, remember that it's much more dmanding than webhosting support. Especially if you're taking a "retail" approach, you'll be dealing with people of all different knowledge levels, including those who have never used dialup before, or have only used AOL. While in hosting you have to know pretty much only your server and control panel (it doesn't matter what the customer uses to connect to their site), but if your supporting dialup customers you'll have to deal with all kinds of PC and modem problems.

And your customers will expect phone support -- after all, if they can't connect to their ISP, how else will they contact you?

JayC brings up some very good points. I know some folks that do dial-up access and it is NOT a cakewalk... the service itself can be easy to offer to resell or offer - but the support is the real monster.

With respect to actual companies that offer this, dialupusa.com is one such company. They have been around for a long time and seem to have their act together with respect to their program.

Originally posted by Jon FB
Why you stop using them?
Are they any good?
Anything bad about them?

The service was good but I just didn't have the time to answer the extra support questions. I would get phone calls whenever the customer had a problem with their modem, phone line, etc. You need to have a setup for 24 hour phone support even if you only have a few customers. It wasn't worth the hassle.

I might offer a combined hosting/dialup package to local clients again. A combination hosting/dialup package around here goes for a decent price. That would be the only way I offer dialup again.

Just to add a little extra info, my company (the parent to 2020visible) offers dialup to clients with whom we have an existing relationship and who need a number of accounts. We don't sell "retail" dialup services, but have found that if we can sell five or six accounts to one company the support burden is less -- in many cases they'll contact someone within the company first for a specific problem, so by the time we get contacted a lot of potential but routine modem problems, etc. have already been ruled out.

Also, since these are accounts sold to businesses, they're normally only used during business hours -- so the support load is lessened.

And by not charging individually for accounts the whole thing is more efficient.

Originally posted by aingaran
Is there anything that is available for Canadians?
Bell Canada
We were looking into it not to long ago , the setup for would have been $15000 to offer DSL service to all of ontario and quebec where bell offered DSL service .
We would have had to fork out an additional $1k[prox] for the L2P connection at 151 front street and then get our own upstreem provider .
For something like $500 per L1 area (and more for L2) we could offer dialup (number , smtp , bandwith ,etc.) provided by bell .
Bit pricey mind you .
We are now looking into doing facilities based DSL, but it is still quite expensive .

All you really need to start an ISP is get some servers and network equipment colocated with some bandwidth and get some numbers

I'm currently setup using www vispweb com (you'll have to rewrite that - I can't post this URL, event though I came here for a different reason :P) - they offer some excellent services for the UK and are very professional on the technical support/sales side.

They require no setup fee and you get the following added benefits:
- 0845 internet access
- Unlimited email addresses
- Flat-rate (FRIACO) internet access
- ADSL 512k -> 2MB
- Your own technical support number branded to your name
- Your own domain name for your company that will support PHP... free for setup (£17.99 a year after the first year of running)
- Your own administrative tools that the customer can use to create their own email addresses and or web space

Just a brilliant service altogether.

Originally posted by CPXHosting
All you really need to start an ISP is get some servers and network equipment colocated with some bandwidth and get some numbers

Correct, but if you live in the UK, a number like that costs a lot of money to start with. Then the internet connection I was quoted at £19,700 a year by BT.

£14,000 a year by NTL and that doesn't include the bandwidth - just the speed.

Chris

do a search for wholesale ips and you will get a whole list of providers with different plans to suit different needs

I received some literature in the mail the other day regarding www.ikano.com

Has anyone heard and good or bad news about them?

Reminds me of iKobo

Don't you mean wholesale isp? not ips?

Chris

I think that vianetworks.com in the UK is now orn is about to offer this.

i checked all of them...
kinda dopey a few of them..
All wanted setup fees or didnt offer numbers where I need em for customers, or didnt offer unlimited dial up.. most wanted to restrict your end users to like 200 hours a month. Hell you can get alot of bigger companies to give you unlimited dial up hours for cheap.
The only one that you can seem to get the most out of for less is affinitypath. Seems like all the companies are real slow in answering sales questions and only want to push their product instead of answering your questions as they slide over them.

I narrowed it down to affinitypath and velocitywest, though both are taking days to answer a simple 3 question email

As I mentioned, www.vispweb.com (also known as IP Support) is excellent.

They answer the telephone calls almostley instantly. You have not setup fee. Can provide dialup/friaco/adsl->2MB. You get a technical support number. An admin pannel. Free domain with hosting. A support number to help you. If you live close enough then you can go on their training course at any time (4hrs I believe and it is free).

You can allow customers to host their web site with you or allow them to host their web site on their own server with you with a domain.

The prices for broadband are exceptionally reasonable, considering the problems with BT Wholesale (ie the £60 setup fee). The prices for server hosting beat www.oneandone.co.uk with around 30GB/40GB a month, they won't limit you but that's how much they'd like you to use maximum.

Not bad considering it's completely free... the only cost is that if you want a branded cd with setup files etc then you have to pay £500 for it. However I created my own in a couple of minutes, using a free setup creator, an autorun file, and resetting all the details to match up with the customers.

You can also let the customers have their own admin account - online signup - web mail and more. They can add/edit/delete email addresses and they can have as many as they want. You can't set a limit on the number of email addresses which is a shame but as I said, it's free.

From ADSL you earn £48 commission per year on standard 512k / 50:1 contention. Or a lot more if otherwise.

Anyway, hope you all found this useful. (Do say I recommended you if you join - name: konectnow)

Chris Evans

Well, its a bit off...but I've been considering Reselling some commercial software or even Affiliate type program for commercial hosting-related software e.g. Modernbill, Cerberusweb, Hivemail, WebuMail mail etc.

ISP type products would be a real support pain...in my opinion. Software would be probably ok.

Originally posted by crowfield99
Does anyone know if there is anything like this in the UK?

If you are a customer of fasthosts.co.uk they give you a dialup account at local rate for free and you can let customers use it.

Greetings:

"Anyone planning on getting into that business should give careful thought to the support issue. "

Awesome point.

We actually wet our toes in the ISP market in mid 1999; and, we found the ISP customer and the business hosting customer were two different type of support clients.

The typical margin on ISP customers was extremely low compared to hosting; and yet they needed up to 1,000% more hand holding.

While we are always open-minded to buying an existing ISP business where by the existing staff would handle the game, it is a new game.

Thank you.

Thanks for all the posts everyone, sorry i havent been around to answer them.. very busy month.

i use affinitypath its great for me

Our company offers a premium nationwide virtual ISP or VISP internet access program. Infomation is available at our site.

tsk tsk...rules rules:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/misc.php?s=&action=forum-rules

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his first post too! Way to make a splash :)

I guess I jumped in the deep end rather than wading in. Sorry. So what now? Am I bannished to the last circle of hell or is there some sort of pentence?

You'll probably need to edit your post to avoid moderator action....not sure, it would be up to the mods.

Mark, I tried to edit but it would not let me as it was older than 15 minutes (by seconds I would guess). Guess I am at the mercy of the moderator. Hopefully they will have mercy on a newby.