Best of the ISP-Lists

Va-Va-VISP

Members of the ISP-Tech list discuss the Virtual Internet Service Provider, or VISP. It's the opportunity to let others run part of your business for you, which is, of course, both a good thing and a bad thing. Read on.

[March 16, 2001]

On the ISP-Tech list in March, MT explained,

"The owners of my company want to outsource some of our dialup services. Has anyone tried the VISP method? What are the pitfalls?"

A number of respondents warned of the dangers of outsourcing:

[TO offered] "Here's my advice, from bitter experience: get a documented escalation path to real technical people, including time frames. Get a current list of POPs so you can update your website. You may end up doing a cut and paste from theirs otherwise. And find out exactly what kind of RADIUS/Proxy RADIUS they support. This is where we got hurt."

[PF added] "Make sure that if you get a certain number of ports—that they are your ports, not shared—and that monitoring is available."

Others had a more positive perspective:

[JT observed] "I've been a VISP for over 5 years. As with any outsourcing, the level of support is directly dependent on attitude. This may sound like a trivial point, but, when you're in the habit of doing everything yourself, it's quite an adjustment depending on someone else. For the most part, I have been very happy, but everyone has bad days: sometimes my requests don't get taken care of fast enough to suit me."

[WW added] "For every bad experience, there are multitudes more good ones. Take the bad experiences for what they teach you to watch out for, but don't let the few that happen in any business be the reason you decide not to go this route."

RS suggested a possible compromise:

"It's all a matter of control and quality of service. With outsourcing, you lose both. Truthfully, though, if we were starting over, I would lobby very hard to outsource. We've got a lot of money tied up in PM3s. I'm happy with them, but now I'm stuck with obsolete modems on a product that's no longer manufactured. What's more, every time we add a PRI or PM3, the profit margin drops like a rock until we start filling it up.

There might be a good balance though: use a VISP to provide 'consumer' service, time-limited access with no guarantees and minimal support. Then provide a 'preferred' service at a much higher rate with unlimited access, guaranteed no busy signals, in-depth support. The 'preferred' service would dial into your own equipment, and the 'consumer' service would dial into the VISP. Then if anybody complains about the VISP, just steer them to the 'preferred' plan.

The result would be higher revenue directly tied to the higher support costs, while the restricted support and user access would allow you to expand your market on the VISP without the higher costs in support. But ultimately, it's going to depend on your market, your company's position in that market, and the outsourcing service."

— End