Growing mobile data usage has led to end users paying substantial data costs, while Internet service providers (ISPs) struggle to upgrade their networks to keep up with demand and maintain high quality-of-service (QoS). This problem is particularly severe for smaller ISPs with less capital. Instead of simply upgrading their network infrastructure, ISPs can pool their networks to provide a good QoS and attract more users. Such a vISP (virtual ISP), for example, Google’s Project Fi, allows users to access any of its partner ISPs’ networks. We provide the first systematic analysis of a vISP’s economic impact, showing that the vISP provides a viable solution for smaller ISPs attempting to attract more users, but may not maintain a positive profit if users’ data demands evolve. To do so, we consider users’ decisions of whether to defect from their current ISP to the vISP, as well as existing ISPs’ decisions on whether to partner with the vISP. We derive the vISP’s dependence on user behavior and partner ISPs: users with very light or very heavy usage are the most likely to defect, while ISPs with heavy-usage customers can benefit from declining to partner with the vISP. Our analytical results are verified with extensive numerical simulations.

中文翻译：

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虚拟ISP的经济可行性

不断增长的移动数据使用量导致最终用户支付大量数据成本，而Internet服务提供商（ISP）努力升级其网络以适应需求并保持高质量的服务质量（QoS）。对于资本较少的较小ISP来说，这个问题尤其严重。ISP不仅可以简单地升级其网络基础结构，还可以将其网络合并以提供良好的QoS并吸引更多的用户。这样的虚拟ISP（虚拟ISP）（例如Google的Project Fi）允许用户访问其任何合作伙伴ISP的网络。我们对vISP的经济影响进行了首次系统分析，表明vISP为试图吸引更多用户的小型ISP提供了可行的解决方案，但如果用户的数据需求不断变化，它可能无法保持正增长。为此，我们将考虑用户对是否从当前ISP缺陷到vISP的决策以及现有ISP关于是否与vISP合作的决策。我们得出vISP对用户行为和合作伙伴ISP的依赖：使用率非常低或非常高的用户最有可能出现缺陷，而使用量大的客户的ISP可能会因为拒绝与vISP合作而受益。我们的分析结果已通过广泛的数值模拟验证。