This turned out to be a very good call as I've heard of consumer ISPs having major problems early on due to the increased load caused by the pandemic while this one never broke and consistently provides me the advertised speed and I feel comfortable hosting services on it (it's in fact designed for that).
Support and account management wise, it has been great. I never have to talk to them, they never have a reason to talk to me (no upselling, "offers", or similar bullshit). I only once had an issue with packet loss to certain destinations, spoke directly to a network engineer (they respond to phones 24/7 and there is no music on hold or IVR) and they resolved it in a matter of hours.
They also have nothing to do with the media or advertising industry and have no reason to leak my info to advertising partners such as Facebook or credit reporting agencies. I am sharing this connection with several people and I'm assuming one is torrenting regularly because the old consumer-grade ISP would constantly send me scary reminders about it but these guys don't have any incentive to do that so it's another plus.
I look at residential ISPs offering Disney+ subscriptions, Apple Music subscriptions, Hulu subscriptions, etc, and - while I understand the draw for some - I consider "here, have a 'free' trial account for something you wouldn't have bought otherwise that helpfully auto-renews!" a definite negative. It's just another way companies can pay to get their foot through my door. In my ideal world, my ISP is a company that earns a healthy margin in exchange for making sure the dumb bit pipe that connects me to the world keeps working most of the time; continuing to earn that healthy margin is the height of their ambition, and a predictable monthly deduction from my bank account is the sum of our interaction.
I've seen advice in the past that buyers who want to avoid the "smart TV" tracking ubiquitous in consumer TV models should check out TVs that are marketed as commercial displays. This got me wondering: would similar logic hold up in picking a commercial ISP as opposed to a residential ISP?
There's a "small business ISP" in my area offering 1 Gbps symmetrical access for $250/mo for a shared line or $850/mo on a dedicated line + $750 installation.
Handwaving the building owner's permission here, it seems to me that $850/mo split eight ways between all the building tenants must yield a massively better load factor than residential ISPs give for a monthly price somewhere between the introductory price and the actual price for 200/100 Mbps Fios when I last had it in 2019.
I suspect we'd even come out ahead by splitting the $250/mo. Even one other tenant buying in would put the price in Fios territory. Doing $250/mo solo wouldn't necessarily be prohibitive either, but >$100/mo would be a pretty steep privacy premium.
My questions:
- Is anybody on HN using a commercial ISP at home today? If so, how has the experience been?
- Is my assumption - that independent commercial ISPs are less likely to bother with privacy invasive measures to wring out extra profit - a reasonable one?
- It seems like if one went through the trouble of doing this for one's own building on principle, one will have done most of legwork required to be able to repeat it N times. Does anyone have experience running a very small ISP? I could imagine this working quite well as a co-op model.