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Ask HN: What do you want your ISP to do better?

4 points by apeace ↗ HN
Hi HN!

I’m a software engineer at a startup ISP. I have some ideas on what ISPs could be doing better in 2021, but I’m seeking more input from the HN community.

A couple of caveats:

- Better customer service is a given. We know ISP customer service sucks, and we’re working on that. (Feel free to share horror stories, though :)

- Speed, price, and reliability are a given. These are basically our number one priorities already.

Here are a couple things I’ve already been thinking about. Feel free to expand on them, disagree with them, or share something completely different!

- What does a more hackable ISP look like? There are obvious things like providing an API to change your Wifi SSID/password, monitor throughput, etc. What else could be made hackable?

- What does a more private ISP look like? A solid privacy policy guaranteeing that traffic isn’t spied on and data isn’t sold would be a good start, but are there more tangible ways to increase privacy? What if we ran Tor nodes on our edge so you could connect to one without traversing the internet? What else could be done?

- What does a more automated ISP look like? What techniques can be used to achieve a massive scale?

So HN: what do you want your ISP to do better?

10 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] thread
mindcrime
So HN: what do you want your ISP to do better?

Provide NNTP service by default, like ISP's used to. Note: I don't personally care about the *.binaries stuff, I'd just like to see ISP's provide NNTP for access to text based newsgroups like comp.ai, comp.lang.c, and such-like. If they wanted to charge extra for *.binaries and guaranteed retention periods, that would be reasonable IMO.

apeace
This is a neat idea, thank you!
wmf
IMO higher-level services like Usenet, email hosting, and Web hosting don't belong in ISPs (which has mostly already happened). Non-binary Usenet seems so small by today's standards that the old federated model should no longer be needed and one big free public server should be enough.
mindcrime
I can appreciate that sentiment, even if I don't share it. And honestly, I don't really need web hosting from my ISP, although I can see how some people would find it handy for small scale personal sites. And I don't use my ISP's email service anyway, if they even still offer it (I've actually never used it, in 15+ years of being with these guys).

But I still kinda wish NNTP was provided "out of the box" by them so I don't have to futz around looking for an NNTP provider, signing up, managing yet another service, etc.

DanAtC
(Better) IPv6 support. For those that don't offer it, start. For those that do, offer more than a /60

Inversely, better IPv4 support: as a startup ISP you probably don't have much v4 space so you'll be relying on on CGNAT. But in the US at least, users have come to expect public IPv4 addresses. If that's too cost-prohibitive, at least make them available upon request or as a value-add.

apeace
These are great suggestions, thank you. I would love to have some "advanced" settings in our customer portal where customers can request a static IPv4. And I would love for us to provide IPv6 as well.
wmf
an API to change your Wifi SSID/password

This seems like a red flag. If you want to make a better router, great, but it shouldn't be part of an ISP.

Automating problem diagnosis and making that customer-visible would be interesting. I don't know if it would cause more problems than it solves.

apeace
Thank you for this. Can you explain why it’s a red flag to you? Are you distinguishing between a local API versus one accessible via the internet?

Problem diagnosis is a great point, thank you.

wmf
I want to use an unmodified off the shelf router; I don't want my ISP to provide a router.
apeace
I gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I think most people don’t want to think about it, but the ability to bring your own router is a great feature.