Mikey! (@[email protected])

@sajiv I pay for the line to your house, that's $245 install, $70/mo. Then I pay for a backhaul port, $2500 for 10GBit, but that gets me zero capacity, which is another $0.65 per megabit, minimum 3 gigabit. So turning up 3 of those $50 eBøx deals would be $5K/mo plus all the other overhead: datacentre (power/space/cooling), the actual equipment (routers, switches, SFPs, PDUs), transit (uplinks), ASN & IP addresses, office admin, technical admin, credit card overhead, the equipment we keep in inventory to sell to new accounts/maintain existing ones, labour costs, regulatory and association fees, whatever sales & marketing. An ISP the size of Server North barely subsists on it's smol-but-very-loyal customer base, however we do a lot of technical consulting as well, which covers a lot. We're also building out in some office and apartment buildings, but that's very difficult to get in the door. Selling things like VoIP? That's just to make the 'bundle' worth it to end-users. TV is a different disaster - the CCSA application fee is like $40K, and you don't get that back if they don't let you into the club. Web hosting is no-profit, but E-Mail hosting... we might actually start marketing our all-in-Canada system. ISP and telcos are fascinating, it's not easy, but I love what I do.