Your Own ISP offers wholesale dialup with published pricing and no long-term contracts—the company strives to develop good and lasting relationships with its clients.

by Jeff Goldman [January 14, 2004]

LightWave Technologies was founded in 1995 as Discount Internet Services, a sole proprietorship, run by Todd Routhier, that offered web hosting and web development. The company now provides a wide range of services including domain name registration, web hosting, and web development, but it focuses on wholesale dialup.

LightWave's wholesale offering, Your Own ISP, was created in response to the difficulties Routhier faced in trying to set up an ISP offering for his company. "We came into the market wanting to start a retail dialup service, but we came in with zero users," Routhier says. "When you talk to most guys, if you have zero users they don't want to give you the time of day."

Your Own ISP Voice: (888) 230-5333 sales@yourownisp.com

The company worked with a few different wholesale providers at first to create its retail ISP, LinkUp America. However, LightWave soon decided to start its own wholesale dialup offering, one that was friendlier to smaller ISPs. "As we grew, we realized that it wouldn't be too hard to do this a whole lot better than a lot of these guys out there," Routhier says.

Routhier says LightWave no longer advertises the retail ISP (which now has fewer than 150 customers), but he says it's a useful asset for the company to have. "We know what's going to happen with our ISPs before they do, because we're doing what they do," he says. "We are an ISP on a day to day basis, so we stay more in touch."

Building relationships
In marketing a wholesale dialup offering, Routhier says it's often hard to stand out from the competition. "We're all out there selling dialup accounts," he says. "A dialup account is a dialup account: it doesn't matter who you buy it from. In many cases, we're all selling the same networks and the same access numbers in the same cities in the same states."

While Your Own ISP does offer a number of additional services, Routhier says the company's greatest strength lies in its relationship with its customers. "Our reps will sit on the phone for two hours in a lot of cases, explaining everything up front," he says. "We go over all the different pieces of our business with them ahead of time, rather than just signing them up in a hurry."

As part of that philosophy, Your Own ISP doesn't require a commitment from its clients. "If you're taking care of your customers, you don't need an eight-page legal agreement to keep them," Routhier says. "If they want to stay with us, they will, and if they don't, they can leave. We've never felt like we needed any sort of a term commitment."

The aim is to develop relationships that will last. "We'd rather have one happy customer than 100 unhappy customers," Routhier says. "That's really how we stand out above the crowd, beyond our pricing or our specific services or options. We stand out because of the way we do business, and our idea of how people should be taken care of."

Published pricing
While Your Own ISP was created to make it easier for startups to enter the business, Routhier says the company can comfortably work with clients of any size. "We're very startup-friendly, but we certainly don't limit ourselves to smaller customers," he says. "We treat everybody the same, whether they have one customer, 1,000 customers, or 10,000 customers."

All pricing for the services is published on the company's web site, and a range of pricing options allow ISPs to choose from a number of different networks. Setup fees can range from $99 to as high as $1,300; per-user costs start at $5.95 a month. Bundled solutions are available, which include e-mail accounts, web hosting, setup CDs, and other services.

Routhier says most customers choose to take advantage of the bundled solutions rather than simply buying raw access, though the range of options promises something for everyone. "A lot of startups are attracted to us because we don't hold people to minimums, but our prices also start dropping when you get some volume," he says. "So it's attractive on both sides."

One of the company's most popular value added services, Routhier says, is the Propel Accelerator. "I think it's the best thing since 56k modems," he says. "There are a lot of skeptics out there, but feedback from our customers is what's important to us, and they've been very happy with it. As far as add-ons go, it's one of the best things we've done."

A winning attitude
Todd Sherfey is President of Aport Computers, a computer supply and repair store in Logan, Ohio. For years, Sherfey had been referring customers to nearby ISPs when they needed dialup access, but he finally decided to start offering access himself. About a year ago, Sherfey started his ISP, Aport Online, using Your Own ISP.

Sherfey first learned of Your Own ISP through a post on the ISP-Lists, but he was won over by the attitude at the company. "We spent two or three hours on the phone with Todd Routhier explaining different things, and he didn't seem to mind," he says. "And he called me back again, and returned my calls, and was always polite."

Your Own ISP's pricing was a little higher than some of the other providers that Sherfey had considered, but he says he's happy with the decision. "They keep adding new features and upgrading the service, and my customers are happy," he says. "We wind up charging a little more, but it's a lot less of a headache, and the customers I get are more the premium class customers."

When he first looked into starting an ISP, Sherfey says he considered purchasing the equipment and doing it all himself, but in the long run, it made a lot more sense to outsource it to Your Own ISP. "They do such a good job, and all I have to do is concentrate on marketing," he says. "I can keep doing what I do, and still have an Internet service."

— End

Related articles:
	[Nov. 3, 2003]	Accurate Billing is a Value-Added Service
	[March 16, 2001]	Va-Va-VISP
	[Nov. 27, 2000]	How to Pick A Wholesale Access Provider

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory