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? -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
