Ask HN: Any Pros to Commercial ISP for a Consumer?
Context: I&#x27;m a somewhat privacy conscious consumer. I opt out of &quot;useful personalization&quot; as much as possible. I find it gross that my ISP looked at all the other companies out there monetizing my data and thought they&#x27;d get in on the action too (&quot;Hey, cool, let&#x27;s inject unique IDs as headers!&quot;). ISPs have never been my favorite companies (e.g. before the adtech epoch, the historical surfeit of games around introductory pricing, the &quot;threaten to cancel&quot; song and dance for achieving price discrimination, deals disallowing usage of some sites without users proving they also have a cable subscription, etc).<p>I look at residential ISPs offering Disney+ subscriptions, Apple Music subscriptions, Hulu subscriptions, etc, and - while I understand the draw for some - I consider &quot;here, have a &#x27;free&#x27; trial account for something you wouldn&#x27;t have bought otherwise that helpfully auto-renews!&quot; a definite negative. It&#x27;s just another way companies can pay to get their foot through my door. In my ideal world, my ISP is a company that earns a healthy margin in exchange for making sure the dumb bit pipe that connects me to the world keeps working most of the time; continuing to earn that healthy margin is the height of their ambition, and a predictable monthly deduction from my bank account is the sum of our interaction.<p>I&#x27;ve seen advice in the past that buyers who want to avoid the &quot;smart TV&quot; tracking ubiquitous in consumer TV models should check out TVs that are marketed as commercial displays. This got me wondering: would similar logic hold up in picking a commercial ISP as opposed to a residential ISP?<p>There&#x27;s a &quot;small business ISP&quot; in my area offering 1 Gbps symmetrical access for $250&#x2F;mo for a shared line or $850&#x2F;mo on a dedicated line + $750 installation.<p>Handwaving the building owner&#x27;s permission here, it seems to me that $850&#x2F;mo split eight ways between all the building tenants must yield a massively better load factor than residential ISPs give for a monthly price somewhere between the introductory price and the actual price for 200&#x2F;100 Mbps Fios when I last had it in 2019.<p>I suspect we&#x27;d even come out ahead by splitting the $250&#x2F;mo. Even one other tenant buying in would put the price in Fios territory. Doing $250&#x2F;mo solo wouldn&#x27;t necessarily be prohibitive either, but &gt;$100&#x2F;mo would be a pretty steep privacy premium.<p>My questions:<p>- Is anybody on HN using a commercial ISP at home today? If so, how has the experience been?<p>- Is my assumption - that independent commercial ISPs are less likely to bother with privacy invasive measures to wring out extra profit - a reasonable one?<p>- It seems like if one went through the trouble of doing this for one&#x27;s own building on principle, one will have done most of legwork required to be able to repeat it N times. Does anyone have experience running a very small ISP? I could imagine this working quite well as a co-op model.