Against the ToS of home providers, sure, but there are tons of companies who will happily sell you transit for your small ISP - including some of the big incumbents, e.g., most of the small wireless ISPs in my area use CenturyLink as their upstream provider. This is a standard service offering in the commercial space, and if you want enough capacity to get 100+mbps service to multiple people, then you're going to be shopping in the commercial space.
CenturyLink is good, and believe it or not, I had an excellent experience with Comcast Business running greenfield fiber for me for backhaul (no one was more surprised than I!). ~$3000/month with a 3 year commit, 100mb symmetrical, and they ran the fiber over a mile with no up front cost.
The service level assurance is radically different between commercial and residential service. The main way that this manifests is that your terms of service on a commercial connection allow you to do all kinds of things you can't do with residential (or business) service - like resell to other people.
Technically, the main difference is that the 100mbit symmetric line is fully provisioned, and so you can actually use all 100mbit of it on a continuous basis. This will quickly get you in trouble with a residential provider. There's also the issue that this is symmetrical, and the way that ISP networks are engineered the upstream is usually actually more expensive to provide (mostly because they use a lot of underlying technologies and equipment that are designed for asymmetric service), and the issue that this service will probably come with fixed IPs that will be SWIPd over to the customer, which is extra administrative overhead, not to mention the IPs themselves getting more expensive to hold these days. Oh, and contract terms regarding service interruptions are usually much more generous towards commercial customers.
Once you really get into the big leagues, you usually don't pay on a cap basis but instead of a 95%ile basis, where you pay a rate based on the 95th percentile of your bandwidth usage over the previous month. These rates end up being very high because you are paying for bandwidth that you actually, seriously used - unlike on a residential connection, where you might pay your ISP for 150Mbps but they expect your 95%ile usage to be more like a couple of Mbps tops (you probably aren't even using the connection at all most of the time).
> There's also the issue that this is symmetrical, and the way that ISP networks are engineered the upstream is usually actually more expensive to provide (mostly because they use a lot of underlying technologies and equipment that are designed for asymmetric service), and the issue that this service will probably come with fixed IPs that will be SWIPd over to the customer, which is extra administrative overhead, not to mention the IPs themselves getting more expensive to hold these days. Oh, and contract terms regarding service interruptions are usually much more generous towards commercial customers.
This isn't really accurate. ISP networks aren't engineered to be asymmetrical and the upstream isn't any more expensive than the downstream. The only asymmetry you will see is in the access network. Anything past that will be symmetrical.
If you use fiber (which almost any 100M or faster service will be) you can have any speed you like up to multiples of 100G symmetrically delivered.
IPs aren't really that expensive either. They are like $1 a pop per month. You can buy you own for $10-20.
Service interruptions will also just get you some service credits proportional to the outage.
Mostly commercial service costs more because you can charge more.
> Once you really get into the big leagues, you usually don't pay on a cap basis but instead of a 95%ile basis, where you pay a rate based on the 95th percentile of your bandwidth usage over the previous month.
You don't really have to be big in any sense to buy bandwidth using 95th percentile billing. I've had circuits on 95th percentile starting at a 100 Mbps commit. Probably could have gotten it at a lower speed too.
However, nowadays bandwidth is so cheap it might not even be sold to you at 95th percentile. It might just be rounded up to the nearest gig.
> These rates end up being very high because you are paying for bandwidth that you actually, seriously used - unlike on a residential connection, where you might pay your ISP for 150Mbps but they expect your 95%ile usage to be more like a couple of Mbps tops (you probably aren't even using the connection at all most of the time).
This is not true (anymore). Bandwidth is dirt cheap. If you have any change in your pocket you can afford a few megs. Prices are like 20 cents a Mbps per month.
A lot of IP transit bandwidth is bought at a colo or an IXP, regardless of where the end customer is physically located.
This is because it is usually more expensive to buy bandwidth directly from the local (monopoly) provider than to buy transport from the same local (monopoly) provider to a colo or an IXP and buy then buy IP transit bandwidth at the remote site.
This is regardless of whether you require a buildout to get last mile service or not. You need not buy bandwidth to get business fiber extended to your premises. Buying transport to a colo or an IXP will suffice.
I was quoted $5000 / month for 10mb connection where I live in Tennessee.
They also run the DSL (3mb on a good day) the long way to where I live by running the opposite direction and putting me at the end of the line (2.5 miles+/-) when they have another line that passes the corner of our property but turns the other direction at the corner and won't tie me into that. (1/2 mile).
Trying to decide if we should just wait for Elon Musk or go back to current satellite tech.
You missed the part where I said they rolled the construction costs into the monthly payment. This was in a suburban area that required permitting and working with other utilities to run underground fiber.
But isn't that what we are talking about in terms of this article and the parent comment. If the parent comment was talking about contracting at a business level with an ISP this would be a totally different conversation...
