Telephone Lines

You need to have enough telephone lines for the dial up customers to log into your system. The Telephone lines are provided by the Department of Telecom. The procedure is same as that of getting a telephone line for your normal business or residential types.

DOT provides telephone lines under various heads such as OYT ( Own Your Telephone) , Non- OYT , SS and Special and Tatkal etc.

All the telephone lines must be from an Electronic Exchange. Your business location plays an important part. Before deciding a location for your set up ensure that you get telephone lines from an Electronic Exchange in that area. If you do not, you need to change your location.

How many phone lines do I need?

This is one of the most important part of your ISP set up . In general , the number of lines you need depends on two parameters.

Customer Base.
Your leased line bandwidth to the Net.

Once you decide on a rough estimate of subscriber base and plan your entire initial hardware setup , decide on the number of telephone lines you need. Since the start up plan is designed with upgradtion and scalability in mind , you may start with few telephone lines and add the number gradually.

The dial up subscribers are not supposed to be hooked on to the net for 24 hours. Though few may "camp on" . The telephone line can be time shared. The ratio of One line to how many customers will play a major role . The ratio could be anywhere between 1:6 to 1:20. We recommend to start with a ratio of 1:10 since as a general rule, 10 users per line is suggested for conventional dial-up connections. So if you expect 100 customers within first month of operation, apply for 10 lines right at the beginning of the project. Many ISPs stretch this out to 20 users where traffic patterns are known (eg where there are many predictable connection activities such as daily uucp short duration connections, limited time PPP connectionss etc..).
You will need to think of your position on this and work out some idea of how many lines you will need. As the existing customer base increases to a level of 1:15 add few more lines to bring back the ratio to 1:10. As an ISP, you have to oversell but never allow this ratio to go beyond 1:20 if you wish to stay in business. If the number of subsciber base is more than 600 , you can still afford to have relaxed ratio. During the initial set up however the ratio should not exceed 1:10. Subscribers will start complaining about busy lines. If getting your number becomes difficult , subscribers who are already logged on do not let off the line frequently compunding your agony.

.....Excerpts from the project report on How to be an ISP in India ?
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