Earn extra revenue by switching business clients to quality ISP's - referral fees!

[tankman1989]

This thread is meant to help tech understand the differences between ISP's so that they can best server their clients and possibly make a nice little referral fee which could pay your monthly Internet bill plus some! Once you understand which of the competing ISP's (of you are lucky to have competing ISP's) offers the better service you can use this to open the door to new business clients and even residential users if you want to target them.

I found that my cable company will give me $100 for every business account referral and $100 credit for any residential service referral (after they pay for 2 months of service). This is a nice bonus but if you are a good tech you can use this as a sales tool to give business clients a higher quality of service and gain their trust & patronage for future services.

If anyone has read my other thread about speedtest.net testing you will see that I have 2 ISP's - cable and DSL. I switched from my cable provider to DSL after they promised to provide the same service I was getting from my cable company for much less and including unlimited national phone calls. The DSL installation was a nightmare and 3 followup visits have been nightmares as well - tons of wasted time & hours & hours on tech support trying to find out why my speeds are 1/8-1/6 of promised speeds. I was forced to call my cable company and get reliable service re-installed but am stuck with both for the time being.

This seems like an incredibly easy sell to businesses who need consistent, reliable, speedy Internet. While I do get somewhat faster speeds on "in-network" servers/sites within the DSL providers network the speeds are still no where near that of the cable provider - note: both packages are 12/2 so there should be no difference in speed.

Now to get an accurate speed test you need to find servers that are NOT on the ISP's network. You can usually find the IP of the testing servers (on speedtest.net) and do a tracert/traceroute to see if the server utilizes non-network backbones for the testing.

My relatively small cable ISP provides full speed access to servers across the country and even across the Atlantic and Pacific! The Internet is a global network so when doing speed tests it is not beneficial to pick the closest server as that doesn't provide a real usage profile of what performance you will get when using 99% of the rest of the Internet.

I think this would be a good sell for any new business consults that you do. You should find out if there is a big difference between you local ISP's and do a little research into their speeds.

Gathering data for the comparison
If you don't have an account with each of the competing ISP's (which I would think many would not) I would suggest creating a Speedtest.net account for each ISP that your customers use. Change the settings to select a server that is not on the ISP's network (located in the "settings tab"). Each time you do support @ the customers, log into your account and run a test. There is a very nice results page which can be exported to CSV for better examination and comparison of the results.

Once you have gathered enough tests to make a judgment as to which service is better, you can present this to clients and have them make the decision.

If the better ISP is more expensive I would compare the amount of time saved with online activites with the better ISP. Make sure to take into account things such as reliability (downtime) as these can be major issues when they hit at the wrong time.

Finally, there are some things that can't be evaluated quite so easily as speed testing but can make a HUGE difference in your experience with the ISP. I've found that my DSL provider has a difficult time keeping connections/tunnels open for any length of time. This is a major problem when transferring large files from servers (FTP/SSH/Rsync/etc). With my cable company my connections remain open for weeks at a time without any issues while I have problems with a connection of over an hour with my DSL provider! This is also a huge problem with RDP, VPN & remote support apps. Finally if the client is using VoIP I would highly recommend a cable provider as it seems that some DSL providers have a tendency to mis-manage VoIP traffic which should have the highest (or near highest) priority as it is a real-time application. This phenomenon has been explained that telco/DSL providers do not like VoIP b/c it directly cuts into their "bread&butter" revenue generator - phone service. This is difficult to prove but seems to be a common complaint that needs to be taken into consideration when choosing the correct ISP.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

This is especially important if you work with business clients. Back in the dial up days I learned to partner up with good ISPs and their business account executives. Build a good relationship with them, and yes you get good referral fees. Plus you get to better control the installation/setup...for your clients. Important because you are the one setting ig up.

 

[SprinterTech-WI]

yep we have solid relationships with both Charter and a few others around here..... we can make upwards of $1K for setting a new customer up.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah Charter is one of the more generous ones.....1.5x first month.
Sell some of their higher end biz services....oh yeah.

 

[tankman1989]

What do you think about my idea of seperate speedtest accounts, one for each ISP so that you can track their performance across your customer base? Is there a better way to do this or a better way to use the results? I figure if you test the internet speed with each visit you are verifying that there isn't something wrong with their network that may go unnoticed otherwise and you are creating a great sample base to use as a selling point for customers. It doesn't take much time to do each test, it's providing network monitoring, etc. This kind of data actually costs a good bit of money to buy for marketing/advertising use.

Is there a way to automate the testing on maybe a daily basis with it automatically logging into a specific account? That would be excellent! A little speedtest client that updates your centralized ISP monitoring account!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I wouldn't waste my time running speed tests and keeping track of that.
When I first setup a connection...I'll run a few while I'm there finishing the setup. But after that....it is what it is.

Plus once you setup a whole business network on a connection...it will test at a lesser speed, because now there is a constant load on the pipe. Trickles of Microsoft updates , other updates, e-mail, offsite backup, antivirus updates, general misc traffic from computers, remote access, etc and etc and more etc. You can really only accurately (and that's a stretch..there is nothing consistent with broadband) test a connection by a single PC plugged directly into the modem/bridge...without a router.

 

[JNEWTON]

Great post tank! Like your input too stonecat

 

[tankman1989]

I wouldn't waste my time running speed tests and keeping track of that.
When I first setup a connection...I'll run a few while I'm there finishing the setup. But after that....it is what it is.

Plus once you setup a whole business network on a connection...it will test at a lesser speed, because now there is a constant load on the pipe. Trickles of Microsoft updates , other updates, e-mail, offsite backup, antivirus updates, general misc traffic from computers, remote access, etc and etc and more etc. You can really only accurately (and that's a stretch..there is nothing consistent with broadband) test a connection by a single PC plugged directly into the modem/bridge...without a router.

Well I can say from the last 3 years experience that this is incorrect in my area and I would assume that the need for this would vary greatly depending upon the area and the ISP's. If you read broadbandreviews and dslreports you'll see how many people have consistent speed problems, often on a predictable time schedule. My idea of testing, in areas where ISP's are providing fractional amounts of their contracted speed, would allow the client(s) to make an informed decision as to whether it is worth the extra $$ to change to a different ISP. As in most situations YMMV but here it has been a major issue since a national telco bought out our local telco. Before the speeds between DSL/Cable (off their network) were not noticeable but now it's turned into a problem.

There's no good way to prove this unless you have some testing results.