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> next to nothing That’s not exactly true, I believe maintenance costs are non-negligible. It’s not like networks are “set up once and forget forever” - over t

> next to nothing That’s not exactly true, I believe maintenance costs are non-negligible. It’s not like networks are “set up once and forget forever” - over time shit always hits the fan somewhere: lines degrade, network hardware goes haywire (frequently, in subtle ways), so after monitors (or customer calls) indicate an issue, it all requires dispatching people to check and fix. Ot doesn’t help that a significant fraction of the reported issues are in customer’s systems (poor WiFi reception, pets nibbling on the wires, malware, etc), and lots of issues are sporadic and non-persistent (something failing at random for 10 minutes a day is even worse that a complete outage). I was a software developer working for a (non-US) ISP, and while I wasn’t working in the field I can say that our line engineers were almost always busy. If it would be easy to set things up, no one would have crappy Internet. The ISP I was working for had a decent competition - IIRC on average our users had about 4-5 alternatives, so unlike some US monopolists we weren’t able to just ignore the issues.

danaliv 6y ago
> our line engineers were almost always busy I should hope so, otherwise you've hired too many line engineers. :) I think an interesting metric would be how many line engineers you had, and how much they cost.
mywittyname 6y ago
True, but a decently-size metro probably only needs an engineer and may 3-4 tech support for every 50k households. In a metro area with 1 million subscribers, that's 20 engineer and maybe 80 tech support, then various administrative staff like payroll, manager, etc (say, another 20 people). Paying salaries of $120k per engineer, $50k per tech support, and $60k per admin, that's $2.4mm + $4mm + $1.2mm = $7.6mm in salaries. That's $8 per year per subscriber. Yeah, you need to pay for equipment and such as well. But there's plenty left in the budget for that. Even if equipment costs were as much as salaries, the ISP only needs to charge $1.25 per month to turn a profit. There's a reason Comcast, et al, are fighting so hard to maintain their monopoly: anyone could seriously undercut them on price and still make buckets of cash.

danaliv 6y ago

> our line engineers were almost always busy I should hope so, otherwise you've hired too many line engineers. :) I think an interesting metric would be how many line engineers you had, and how much they cost.

mywittyname 6y ago

True, but a decently-size metro probably only needs an engineer and may 3-4 tech support for every 50k households. In a metro area with 1 million subscribers, that's 20 engineer and maybe 80 tech support, then various administrative staff like payroll, manager, etc (say, another 20 people). Paying salaries of $120k per engineer, $50k per tech support, and $60k per admin, that's $2.4mm + $4mm + $1.2mm = $7.6mm in salaries. That's $8 per year per subscriber. Yeah, you need to pay for equipment and such as well. But there's plenty left in the budget for that. Even if equipment costs were as much as salaries, the ISP only needs to charge $1.25 per month to turn a profit. There's a reason Comcast, et al, are fighting so hard to maintain their monopoly: anyone could seriously undercut them on price and still make buckets of cash.