Important considerations for choosing your wholesale ISP or VISP
The advantage of working with a Virtual ISP or a VISP is that
the Virtual ISP will take care of most of the technical issues
and therefore you can start and run an ISP business even if
you have limited technical skills. While working with a wholesale
ISP or a Virtual ISP, your primary task is to market your
services and acquire customers. The wholesale ISP provides
internet access to these customers on a per-user or per-port
basis. The difference between what you charge the end users
and what you pay to the wholesale ISP is what goes into your
pocket. Some points that you need to consider while choosing
your wholesale ISP or VISP are as follows:
1. Wholesale ISP / VISP
Network coverage - A Virtual ISP or VISP procures the
dialup access from large network providers. While choosing
a VISP you need to know the coverage of the networks being
used by the wholesale ISP. What level of network redundancy
is there, what geographical regions are covered, how many
local access numbers are there, etc.
2. Pass through Radius and Radius Authentication
You can choose to provide your own radius authentication or have the wholesale ISP provide it for you. With Pass Through Radius you can have a shared or private realm. There might be initial set up costs involved.
3. Technical Support for you and/ or your customers
A Virtual ISP can offer technical support for you and/or your
customers. Usually a VISP will offer technical support to
you however you will be responsible for offering technical
support to your customers. Some wholesale ISP may offer direct
support for your customers. In either case you should find
out the support process, support hours, average response times,
etc.
4. Customer usage hours, online registration and email
You need to know what kind of usage restrictions the wholesale
ISP has. Do your customers get unlimited dialup usage, unlimited
connections, or are there any restrictions on these. A Virtual
ISP will also offer online registration capabilities for your
customers and you can find the possibility of customizing
this registration process.
Does the wholesale ISP offer
email services for your users? If so, you should find out
how many email accounts the VISP will be giving for your plan
and what will be the email storage capacity. Some wholesale
ISP offers may also include value-adds such as antivirus and
spam-protection for email accounts. Alternatively you can
also choose to provide your own email service to users instead
of email service from the Virtual ISP.
5. ISP Administrative Backend
A wholesale ISP will give you access to a secure website where
you can login to manage and view your dialup customers. You
should evaluate the backend to understand what functionalities
it offers and how comfortable you are with it. A good backend
is very important as it will be your primary means for operating
your ISP. A Virtual ISP may also offer you end user billing
services integrated into the backend. It will be a good idea
to ask for a demo of the backend from the VISP.
6. Payments & Billing terms
Make sure to go through the billing and payment terms of the
wholesale ISP very carefully. A Virtual ISP may require an
initial deposit; there may also be some minimum usage terms,
procedures in case of delayed payments, etc.
7. Other features
Compare the other value-added features that you can get from
wholesale ISPs. A VISP may offer a portal for users, any consumer
software that can be offered to users, users backend for your
customers to view or update their account information. Pay
attention to these other features offered by the Virtual ISP
which may enhance the service for your users.
Before finalizing a Virtual ISP or VISP,
it is very important to do your research to find the wholesale
ISP that can best meet your needs. Choosing your wholesale
ISP is one of the most important decisions for your ISP business
and you want to be sure that the wholesale ISP you finally
work with is reliable, responsive to your needs as wells as
competitively priced.
