Here's a case where a 3rd party worked in our favor:
A vending machine company sells these fancy juke boxes to bars. They
download songs over the Internet so they have a library of millions of
songs you can pick from without actually having to store millions of
songs. The bar needs an internet connection for this to work of
course. Several of these bars had a recurring "issue" where the Jukebox
would stop working and they'd call the vending machine company who would
then call us and find out the bill for Internet wasn't paid. So the
vending machine company took over the Internet bills for several of
these bars.
From my perspective this was a win-win. The vending machine company
pays the Internet bill reliably and on time every month. The bar owner
always calls them for support anyway, and barely knows who we are. The
vending machine co has to collect on their service contract anyway, so
collecting on the Internet at the same time wasn't a big deal to them,
but now they don't have to take the call about the jukebox "not working"
due to the Internet bill not being paid.
.....lots of other times the 3rd party seller was more trouble than they
were worth, but in this particular case we were better off having them
in the loop.
On 8/17/2020 8:39 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
It means what the contract says it means, but there's probably at least 3
issues:
1) Taking away potential customers.
2) Whether it is shared/oversubscribed service (either residential or
commercial), or DIA which by definition is dedicated bandwidth that you can use
100% 24x7 if you want.
3) Who has the end customer relationship, for purposes of AUP/TOS,
maintenance, etc. I will no longer sell through middlemen, where I don't have
the end customer relationship. If someone wants a commission of some sort for
bringing me the sale, that's different. But if the customer wants to open a
trouble ticket, I want them to call me, not some reseller. If we see a
violation of our terms of service, or get a court order from LEA regarding
customer's use of the connection, or an abuse report, or we need to do
maintenance or a repair, I want a name and number to call. If the connection
is down, I want an actual site contact to find out if power is on, etc. If we
do a dispatch, I want a contact for someone who will meet us at the site.
We've all heard stories of WISPs who get calls about an outage or lousy service
from customers they don't recognize, only to discover that a customer is
reselling their service to several neighbors. You go to a site like
speedtest.net and it tells you the provider, not the reseller, so that's who
you badmouth for having bad service. Even if it's the guy with the Linksys
router in the Tupperware tub who is reselling the service.
Comcast has had cases where some guy orders one residential cable connection in
each of several dozen MDUs, and then goes into business selling that service to
the other residents, at a rate below Comcast's retail rate. So they don't get
any other customers in those buildings. Needless to say, they got their
lawyers involved.
-----Original Message-----
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Adam Moffett
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2020 7:02 PM
To: af@af.afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] What is “reselling”?
I think if you provide some significant part of the infrastructure required to reach that end user
then you're not reselling, you are just the next tier in the chain of service providers. The
ongoing use of the concepts of "Tier 1" through "Tier 3" providers supports
that notion.
I've always thought of reselling as being a middle man in the sales channel
without putting in significant last mile infrastructure. At one time we were
reselling Verizon DSL. We had a connection to them and they would somehow L2
bridge the DSL traffic from our customers' lines over an ATM circuit to our
office. We provided AAA and L3 connectivity to the Internet, but they provided
the entire last mile connection. If you paid them more per unit they would do
the entire thing from the house to the Internet and all you did was push money
around (and take the support calls). Those are clear reseller scenarios.
To Chuck's comment about the AUP: I would definitely disallow the first
practice unless someone is paying appropriately for a Tier2 service. I don't
actually care if they do the second scenario. If they want to buy my service
and mark it up $20 and call it their own then I 100% don't care (MSP's do that
all the time, in fact). I'm getting paid either way. I might even be inclined
to encourage that if the middle man is competent.
-Adam
On 8/17/2020 6:54 PM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
Define “reselling” a circuit.
Obviously getting a connection and sticking customers on the provider’s IP
addresses would be reselling without a doubt.
Is running a tunnel over a circuit back to a data center and sticking customer
traffic in the tunnel reselling? I would think not as the only thing the
connection is carrying is my VPN traffic.
So now further down the rabbit hole - if the provider supports BGP and I’m
using my IP addresses - am I “reselling” the provider’s service or mine?
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