raytaylor:

 

MichaelNZ:

 

That is fine, however, some ISP's use business accounts as a way to cross-subsidise their residential services. It's the only explanation I can think of for the difference in price.

 

Which is kind of odd because as a business user -

 

1. I don't bitch and moan and then leave them because someone else decided to lower the bar even further price wise. In this vein I don't play them off against bottom of the barrel ISP's either.

 

2. I don't ask for free equipment. In actual fact, I don't want it.

 

3. I'm easy to support

 

4. My data usage is fair to them

 

5. I don't do dumb stuff like have my login credentials compromised and get their MX RBL'ed.

 

And to be clear I am talking in general here. Obviously, in this neck of the woods (geekzone) I expect I am among like minded people.

 

You are definitley not the norm. Businesses seem to require much more support in my expierence. 

 

To me the requirements for BGP is VERY much out of the ordinary. Most companies have moved to cloud email providers so the necessity to have on-prem email servers with the associated Static IP and unblocking of port 25 that entails. And then if they are hosting a site that is also hosted in the cloud for the same reason. AWS/GCP/Azure do an excellent job of providing WAF/DDoS controls that just don't scale to the home environment.

Then the end result is companies only need a dumb internet connection with NAT and perhaps a firewall for additional outbound / inbound control if required.

If even 1% of the business customers asked for it I would be surprised and that would only be on 1+GB symmetrical not UFB connections. And because of that the ISP will need to configure very explicit BGP import/export rules for the address space that you have. Make sure that is properly distributed across any nodes they have and allocated only to your connection.

All of that custom configuration takes time to design and implement, plus make sure that the Level 1 support tech if they ever receive a call on your connection knows not to deprovision it and reprovision it as an initial fault finding step.

To me that is why it costs money, as it costs money to put in, plus support as an exception to every other customer they have. And that custom configuration will need to be managed across release cycles when the core routers are upgraded to make sure that the configuration doesn't get lost.

I think that if companies are offering service with BGP for twice what the residential rate is that's an incredibly good deal, since if it was me I would charge 10x more to discourage this terrible behavior.