How can I buy end-user bandwidth for my customers? [closed]

I sell a product to customers, and as part of this product I have a website where customers can upload data for processing. The data is of considerable size (gigabytes).

I am looking to buy extra bandwidth for my customers, and to make the arrangement with their ISPs myself so that the experience is seamless to the end users. Many of my customers are on university or corporate networks where they would be unable to make the arrangement themselves even if they wanted to. The extra bandwidth would apply only to connections to my website, not to the customer's other connections.

Basically I am looking for this sort of arrangement:

Is this sort of thing possible?

Edit: Now that the United States has ended net neutrality, is it possible?

Solution 1:

It sounds like in effect you want to pay a users ISP to zero-rate traffic to your site, similar how to some cell carriers allow you to stream video from certain websites without impacting your allocation. If you are a major company like Google or Netflix then this has a ghost of a chance of being feasible, otherwise most companies will not talk to you -- its not worth their time to implement the necessary infrastructure for such a small user base.

The corporate or school clients (I am thinking such as a hotel) may very well not have the capacity to scale their bandwidth in an economic way either. They may have the equivalent of a T1 (hence the connection metering), and the only way to go above that is to buy another entire T1. You aren't going to want to pay for that. If your service is profitable enough to make those kind of deals anyway then your clients would be able to afford commercial tier ISPs anyway and won't need you to do so.

If you approached someplace that could meaningfully scale their bandwidth, they'd still want you to foot the bill for the whole years worth of extra bandwidth since they likely have a yearly contract. Anything government or education related (state schools) would have its own entire issues with procuring extra capacity at your behest.

So, if you have very very deep pockets and an army of lawyers and marketers then you might make some progress, but the model just does not scale and I can't fathom how it would be profitable.

Solution 2:

For all intents and purposes, no, this is not possible. Even if it were, the technical and contractual logistics required would cripple your business.

Think through this a bit more: Joe user at University signs up for your service. You then approach one of the University's many providers (which one? How might you know what provider Joe user's traffic egresses out of today, let alone tomorrow when things change). So then you have to make agreements with all of their providers. But then you realize that somehow you need to make an addendum to a contract that was made between the provider and the university, without the university's involvement?!? How exactly do you expect that to work? Oh and then, you realize that Joe user's traffic is likely subject to heavy traffic shaping and that any "extra bandwidth" you could procure (if such a thing were even possible) would be pointless due to traffic shaping rules. Even if traffic shaping rules weren't in play, why do you think traffic to/from your site should get special treatment? How do you thing the network people would feel about that?

See? It's impossible for many, many reasons. Honestly, though, I think you're proposing a solution for a non-existent problem. If your customers are on university or corporate networks, there is likely plenty of bandwidth to spare. A few gigabytes is not that much data, and is lost in the noise when viewed with all of the other traffic on the network.