Hi HN!<p>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.<p>A couple of caveats:<p>- 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 :)<p>- Speed, price, and reliability are a given. These are basically our number one priorities already.<p>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!<p>- 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?<p>- 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?<p>- What does a more automated ISP look like? What techniques can be used to achieve a massive scale?<p>So HN: what do you want your ISP to do better?
<i>an API to change your Wifi SSID/password</i><p>This seems like a red flag. If you want to make a better router, great, but it shouldn't be part of an ISP.<p>Automating problem diagnosis and making that customer-visible would be interesting. I don't know if it would cause more problems than it solves.
(Better) IPv6 support.
For those that don't offer it, start. For those that do, offer more than a /60<p>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.
<i>So HN: what do you want your ISP to do better?</i><p>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.