What are the sizes of some of the ISP companies we use?

Just a nosy question. We talk about using different ISP's, but what are the sizes of these companies? Do they have 1000 customers, 10000 customers etc... Are they supported by multiple company staff or just 1. Do we actually care, if the resulting service is there, when we need it?

Just thinking out loud. Anyone actually know?

Most resellers are one man bands running out of a their bedroom, they tend to give the impression that they have other people working for them, which can be taken with a pinch of salt.

You could always pop down to our offices for a coffe while we try to convince you to use our services over others

In reply to a post by vivaciti:

You could always pop down to our offices for a coffe while we try to convince you to use our services over others

Yes and if you carn't convince me i could always pop upstairs to the massage parlour

In reply to a post by iand:

Just a nosy question. We talk about using different ISP's, but what are the sizes of these companies? Do they have 1000 customers, 10000 customers etc... Are they supported by multiple company staff or just 1. Do we actually care, if the resulting service is there, when we need it?

Just thinking out loud. Anyone actually know?

Do you mean ISPs and vISPs, or just vISPs - resellers of Enta and/or other services?

There is no upstairs, it's a single story building.

ISP, vISP??? Just the people that we are all signing up to now enta is not as good as it has been in the past, for some people.

Big ISPs include BT, Orange, TT, O2/Be etc.

Small ISPs include Zen, IDNet, Newnet, AAISP.

I'm not sure which of those to put Plusnet in.

The virtual ISPs are the likes of vivaciti, ukfsn, Titan, ADSL24, Falconnet and so on.

Xilo I think are a vISP in these terms but I could be wrong. They certainly do a lot of reselling at the Home level.

People leaving Enta seem to be going to all of the above except Orange.

So maybe you see the reason for my question?

Even defining vISP may be harder than it used to be. IIRC some of the resellers use their own Radius Server (and IP ranges, etc) whereas others are really only a referrer for the wholesaler.

I may be wrong in the following so treat me gently. As I see it:

In the past (say 3-5 years ago) with BTW based services you either had your own BT Central(s) + Radius + etc which made you an ISP (even if you only had one minimum central and 1000s of users overloading it). If you sold some-one else's service (white labeled in effect) then you were a vISP. There were only a few suppliers or wholesalers who created a middle ground. Examples of the middle ground might have been the L2TP customers over Enta and Tiscali. With L2TP the central-centric definition used for example by ThinkBroadband was a little harsh as the (v)ISP had most of the benefits but few of the upfront costs of centrals. One can argue if that made them more or less secure.

With the advent of resold LLU services there appears to me to be more use of L2TP and more likelyhood of the (v)ISP Reselling it having their own Radius and Interconnects. One presumes they host this in one of the big data centres and take a fat-ish pipe straight from (say) C&W into their radius and gateway. Or maybe not. Some of this simplicity may also carry over to IPSC and WMBC even though BTs charges are rather higher.

I reckon someone like Boggits is probably the best to shed light on this. Some others could but it might rather reveal their own business/network model.

Very true. It's a minefield, especially for thinkbroadband, but I wasn't really aiming at that type of discussion.

I was merely trying to point out to iand that without his defining what sort of "ISP" he meant then the question was unanswerable. I wasn't trying to be awkward with him.

The big boy figures are easily available through the Main Site News Articles. Entanet, Plusnet, the smaller fry and resellers so far as I know not available at all

What about Tesco? Waitrose? The Post Office and Vodaphone?

Edit - Re-reading the Subject. Ian says some of. That won't do. He needs to list the ones he means.

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 25-Nov-09 22:26:22)