Here in Greece it's also hard to be a dialup service provider. These companies depend on other services in order to survive such as leased lines, VISPs, web hosting and even co-location.
Most of them even do their own web authoring since it doesn't come cheap to create a relatively modest web site. So the question is how can a dialup provider survive without these "added" services.
Even if you are not a "cheap" one and charge a great ammount of money you have to pay for modems (not to mention that an ISP that respects himself uses dialup access servers), 24/7 support staff, leased lines, billing software not to mention a small group of sales/market-droids.
I believe that the only way for such a company to survive is to use free software for it's infrastructure (linux firewall, squid proxy etc) and modular hardware. I know that a cisco access server with mica modems is too expensive but is also quite modular. No need to support 10 racks of modems. Simply pay a little more (you can also by them using leasing), consolidate and save yourself the trouble. Back in 1999 I worked for a small ISP (approx. 300 users) and we were using a Cisco 3460 with a primary isdn and mica modems. No trouble there.
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Here in Greece it's also hard to be a dialup service provider. These companies depend on other services in order to survive such as leased lines, VISPs, web hosting and even co-location.
Most of them even do their own web authoring since it doesn't come cheap to create a relatively modest web site. So the question is how can a dialup provider survive without these "added" services.
Even if you are not a "cheap" one and charge a great ammount of money you have to pay for modems (not to mention that an ISP that respects himself uses dialup access servers), 24/7 support staff, leased lines, billing software not to mention a small group of sales/market-droids.
I believe that the only way for such a company to survive is to use free software for it's infrastructure (linux firewall, squid proxy etc) and modular hardware. I know that a cisco access server with mica modems is too expensive but is also quite modular. No need to support 10 racks of modems. Simply pay a little more (you can also by them using leasing), consolidate and save yourself the trouble. Back in 1999 I worked for a small ISP (approx. 300 users) and we were using a Cisco 3460 with a primary isdn and mica modems. No trouble there.