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How are they not viable businesses? Even if you remove the legal barriers there is a high cost to starting an ISP with the amount of physical capital that needs
by lovich 8y ago
How are they not viable businesses? Even if you remove the legal barriers there is a high cost to starting an ISP with the amount of physical capital that needs to be set up. Its not like its some business where a competitor can spin up on a whim and you're forced to deal with incredible amounts of competition.
Sure the ISPs profit would likely go down, but it wouldn't go to zero. Just like every other capital intensive business on the planet
- jf 8y agoNeither of the ISPs that I worked for had legal barriers that I noticed (especially in Rwanda), the barriers that I did notice were physical capital, as you mention. You do raise a good point about "viable business", what I was trying to communicate was "a business where both the business and the customer benefit", and as you pointed out, that's not what "viable business" means. I can only speak from my experience here, and my experience was that the financial constraints on both of the ISPs I worked for were such that many, many compromises had to be made. For example, the ISP in California used consumer-grade hardware, so the ARP tables would fill up after about 48 hours, so we wrote scripts to reboot the routers every 24 hours - this killed all active TCP/IP sessions and stopped service for about a minute. The ISP in Rwanda only had a ~3mbps satellite link, so we set up a transparent proxy to ignore HTTP headers and aggressively cache data to increase the apparent throughput. These kind of compromises stand in contrast to similar work I did for a community college, where we didn't have to make compromises like that.