[AusNOG] Pricing for Going Direct To NBN Co (vs, Aggregator)

[John Edwards]

On 9 December 2015 at 08:47, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org> wrote:

> On 8 Dec 2015, at 12:44 PM, Chad Kelly <chad at cpkws.com.au> wrote:
>
> > While all this sounds fantastic in theory has anyone actually worked out
> some numbers, like what the start up costs for such an organisation would
> be and what the ongoing costs would be?
> > Some kind of a business plan would be handy as well, as you would need
> to figure out how you were going to fund the thing.
>
> “Bandwidth co-ops” have been an obsession of this community since the
> aussie-isp days.
>
> Maybe earlier than that.
>
> They’ve never worked because the parts of the industry that want one are
> too tiny to
> develop the buying power necessary to make the business model work.
>

I wouldn't say they've never worked, but that will depend on your
definition of "worked", and they usually involve one player having more
skin in the game than the rest. The moment that player has enough volume to
go it alone, participation in the co-op is really just propping up their
competitors.

Quite possibly the failure of such co-ops created the wholesale aggregator
business that small ISP's can enjoy on more commercial terms today.

Ausbone was great as a non-profit until some of its members didn't pay
their bills, dragging everyone down with them.

AdNAP was a successful model for a Bandwidth Co-Op that purchased and
aggregated wholesale ADSL services in Adelaide, but ultimately the owner
and major user gobbled up the dozen other participants and the co-op itself
became an abstraction layer for provisioning.

This thread deserves a shout-out to the people in the industry who put more
effort than they had to into co-op style initiatives.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20151209/c15c6661/attachment.html>