| There's really nothing like being in
control - especially when you're in business for yourself. But for facilities-based ISP
owners that dream can slip away as the daily grind of technical challenges, rising
operating costs, contract minimums, and customer support woes takes its toll.
We hear about this pain daily from prospective ISPs that
have not yet leveraged a partnership with a quality Wholesale ISP. However, after a
well-executed import of subscriber data, ISPs make more money while working fewer hours.
Fixed costs are eliminated. Lost sleep and demanding technical challenges become a thing
of the past.
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. |
