The Solution to all our Problems/Internet Co-operative

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Tizlox
sorry to be the one who brings us all back to reality, but we're walking around with our heads in the clouds. Unless some of us won the jackpot a few times on the lotto, I dont think we stand a chance of getting this idea off the ground.

A 100% free ISP right now is just a pipe dream, unless somebody buys 20ADSL's in dublin and hooks up the whole country to 56k always-on access.

I don't think anyone was suggesting that it would be 100% free. I disagree that the whole cooperative thing is futile.

This should all be discussed on the Net Comms board, but anyway...

First of all, you have to decide what mechanism you are going to use to deliver bandwidth to the homes. The options are:

1. Eircom's network in the fashion of a standard ISP. As Muchos Bongo points out, most ISPs are controlled by telcos. This makes it very difficult for independent ISPs to survive. You will be competing with ISPs that are actually owned by telcos.

2. Eircom's local loop via LLU. There is some promise here, namely a relatively low monthly charge. DSLAMs and other DSL equipment have all come down in price. A project is in progress in the US to use DSL to provide broadband to 40 members of a cooperative. You will need a telco licence.

3. Bypass Eircom's local loop using wireless. A variety of options are open here. Some of them require special licences and others are very limited in power. Nevertheless it is an option. You will probably need a telco licence as well.

4. Lay your own wires. This is not as mad as it seems. A project in Wellington, NZ linking up the business district using ethernet cable linked together using cheap PCs running unix as routers. It works.

There are probably more options.

Then read everything you can on the chosen option and try to work out the cost.

Then, if necessary, call a consultant.

None of these will be easy, but there are examples of them working or nearly working in the world.

Paddy20

Tizlox,

Where on earth did you read that a 100% free ISP right now was a reality??...

Thats the biggest load of hogwash I have ever seen and an insult to the intelligence of your average IOFFL member.

Co-operative enterprises live and work in the real world and they must stand or fall by the rules of the marketplace, with one "vital" differance. They operate for and on behalf of their member/shareholders who benefit because profits are ploughed back in so that the members can have cheaper goods or "SERVICES". It really is that simple. It works - and the pieces of paper known as share certificates can be sold by any member at any time for the full market value of each share.

Perhaps, Skepticone is correct when he suggests that this should be discussed on the Net Comms board?... However, if a suggested "Poll" requesting funding for a feasibility study is rejected on this forum where the suggestion developed from an original Solutionz thread. Then that would appear totally illogical too me.

It appears we are all prepared too line Eircoms pockets by running up on-line bills - but when in reality it comes to funding a feasibility study which is step one in finding a resolution too our main problem. A deadly silence descends - the "POLL" suggestion is given the thumbs down from Dustaz before it is given a chance too draw breath?...

What exactly is happening - It is beyond me, and this is where I sign off from this forum for good.

leoc

I don't think the ISP idea will work as intended. For one thing, I expect it's not commercially feasible. This isn't because it would cost a lot of money, or even because it's difficult to raise capital for telecoms or Internet ventures at present. It's because you would be very unlikely to get back any of the money you spent.

It's all about barriers to entry. Anyone establishing a FRIACO ISP in Ireland at the moment would face high and unpredictable costs and delays. To start with there would be the ordinary and relatively predictable - but still significant - costs, mainly those of buying your hardware and paying your engineers to install and tend to it. But of course the real questions are how much money you would end up tithing to Eircom, how much time and money you would spend tussling over how much you ought to have to tithe to Eircom, and how much Eircom would drag their feet even after conditions had been agreed or imposed. But let's assume you do indeed get through all the hoops before your money, or your creditors' patience, runs out, and you are about to offer the country unmetered dial-up Internet access. Now, if not sooner, you encounter the real problem. Eircom faces almost no delays or marginal cost in introducing the same service. Some time before or shortly after you launch, Eircom offers everyone unmetered service, at a rate not far above (perhaps indeed below) the one you intend to charge. Competing against Eircom, you would be most unlikely to get enough subscribers to cover your running costs, let alone recover your capital investment.

So is trying to launch a FRIACO ISP to offer unmetered access a bad idea? Not /necessarily/. After all, if the mission is to make unmetered available rather than to make money, then getting Eircom to offer unmetered access is 'mission accomplished'. Note that once Eircom makes a reasonable unmetered offer available, they will have great difficulty in taking it away again, for PR and regulatory reasons. Therefore the ISP wouldn't need to stay going for very long after Eircom brings in unmetered. In fact, if Eircom were to pre-empt the ISP's launch by bringing in unmetered before then, it would probably be unnecessary to begin service at all. Similarly, the ISP wouldn't need state-wide coverage. For those same regulatory and PR reasons, it would be impossible for Eircom to make unmetered available only to the areas which the ISP serves. In fact, probably all that is necessary is to cover a single well-chosen exchange, or perhaps a handful of such dotted around the country. Further, an application for FRIACO would remove the ODTR's excu^H^H^H^Hdilemma that it can't mandate FRIACO because no ISP has requested it.

Might it be feasible to do this? The ISP would of course need the skills and capital to actually set up and operate as intended if necessary. The capital would have to come from sources happy to lose all of their investment if necessary, so no VC, bank money, Enterprise Ireland money, etc. If the regulatory battles went well and ended quickly, and Eircom decided to go unmetered quickly in response, it might actually be possible to return most of the money raised, but of course it would be impossible to rely on that happening. On the other hand, the ISP would have to be able to make a profit in the absence of any serious competing unmetered offer, in case Eircom decided to try to call its bluff. (If the service is at all competently set up and run, surely that shouldn't be too hard in light of the huge demand for unmetered?) Since the name of the game would be winning the regulatory battle and proving our point, not building an ISP or making money back, equipment could be leased and work contracted out to reduce capital costs as much as possible without missing that minimal profitability target. If someone does want to put the issue of cost to the Net/Comms board, it would probably be better to put it in these terms rather than just asking "how much is an ISP?", which is a quite different question. Once we have a back-of-the-envelope figure, we can compare it to a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much money could be raised for such a purpose. My casual guess is that tens of thousands of euro is probably doable, low hundreds of thousands of euro might be concievable, and millions of euro is right out.

BIG FAT CAVEAT: I'm no expert on anything, and I haven't exactly been researching any of this. All of the above is just offhand, semi-informed guesswork.

The Cigarette Smoking Man

I think the only way of getting a flat rate ISP off the ground is to bypass Eircom altogether, ie Wireless. The cost of bitstream DSL would only make the overall cost marginally cheaper than Eircoms offerings. Also the cost of putting DSLAMs in exchanges is not cheap, there's a huge capital requirement there plus the cost of the connectivity from the individual exchanges back to the ISP.

I think the approach that the Irishwan group are taking is the right way to do it. Their model gives them direct access to their users with no money going to another company. This effectively saves them €49 a month per user, therefore the only cost they have is for the bandwidth they need to run the service plus their network costs. The only way to compete with the large telcos is establish a large customer base and then buy bandwidth in bulk. Then you'll be able to introduce contention ratios, which will in turn bring more savings.

With wireless you could also offer tiered services, for example a lot of people don't want/need broadband so you could offer an always on 64k option for a lower price. Another advantage of wireless is the bandwidth which can go up to 11Mb on 802.11b, so you could offer your users higher bandwidth for traffic that stays within the network. Eircom et al with their DSL won't be able to match that. Expanding on that, you could peer with other Irish ISPs and because of the relatively low cost you could offer higher bandwidth to traffic that stays within the country.

My €20 is in the post