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I've spent most of my career (15+ years now) building and maintaining private regional ISPs that compete with big TelCos, with considerable success. It's surpri

I've spent most of my career (15+ years now) building and maintaining private regional ISPs that compete with big TelCos, with considerable success. It's surprisingly feasible to start an ISP in your garage with a few thousand dollars and grow it to a few hundred customers just by providing decent customer service and a working product. If you've ever been curious about what it takes to get started with something like that I'm happy to answer questions - here or email in my profile.

iopuy 10y ago
For community benefit, do you think you could give us a quick summary of the stages involved? Specifically, how does one go about leasing a connection from a larger Telco? Doesn't this normally cost 10 of thousands of dollars per month?
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Sure! For the better part of 2015 my job was to fly in to specific markets in the US and spend 2-4 days building a plan for a wireless ISP network that would be built a few months later. I'll summarize the process that I used, perhaps that will be helpful? First I should explain that my experience is in fixed wireless networks[0] more than fiber. First, I would spend some time on Google Earth looking for good neighborhoods to serve. A good neighborhood is typically a dense suburban development with low tree growth. Then I look for potential places to put the access points to serve the area - you really need line of site (no trees) to each home to provide good service. Water tanks, mountains/hills, office buildings and even residential homes make good access point locations. Often you can negotiate a rooftop lease with a place like that for a few hundred dollars a month (or even less). You can also use commercial cell phone towers, but they're more like 1-2k/month. You really want to be able to see a few hundred rooftops within 5-10 miles of your access point location to make it worthwhile. Next you need to figure out how to get service to your access point location, like you mentioned. You really only need a few hundred mbps circuit to start though, a 1gbps circuit will last you up to a few hundred customers at least. Your first circuit shouldn't cost more than 2k to maybe 3.5k / month. The hard part is finding it in a place where you can then get it delivered to your access point location. Sometimes you get lucky and find an office building near a suburban neighborhood that already has a fiber demarc in the basement - that's a slam dunk. More often you have to lease space on an office building in the city, buy your fiber circuit there, and then use a high capacity wireless backhaul to relay the service to your access points. I would usually just drive around the main roadways looking for the orange stickered fiber whips to see where the fiber lines run, then call the company to get pricing. (can't find a photo at the moment, I'll keep looking.) Then, you just start building and signing people up. Lot's of people make the mistake of trying to go cheap on the customer install, many WISPs start by trying to install their customers with in-home radios rather than putting them on the roof. That doesn't work. Regardless of the type of equipment you use, you have to put a good radio on the roof with a reasonably high gain directional antenna pointing to your tower. The other common early pitfall is to try to use regular WiFi devices for your network. WiFi is designed to work well in buildings / office parks, not so much outside and long-ish distances. Ubiquiti equipment is a good start and very cheap, although there are better ones. The hardest part about signing up customers is paying for their equipment up front. You're looking at 250-350$ per customer installation (including amortizing infrastructure build) if you're in an area where the incumbent is really bad you can sometimes charge some of that to the customer. The ROI isn't too bad even if you eat that cost - less than a year - but it can be hard when you're starting out. The next hard part is jumping over the scaling humps. You'll need a staffed support center and NOC before you're fully able to afford it, for example. Disclaimer - this is what I'm working on know, providing a variety of the backend services that these WISPs usually need / benefit from but can't afford to build on their own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...
  - mozumder 10y ago
    How much would it cost to actually dig a line to the nearest Internet peering exchange? Just to build an underground backbone fiber line itself, in terms of cost/mile? And how different is that from a neighborhood underground line? This would be for Washington DC suburbs - Germantown, MD. I mostly want to know about the backbone-level work. We already have pretty fast Verizon FIOS, so I'm trying to figure out what it would take to go to the next level - 10gbps, etc..
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      Once you start looking at trenching fiber you're looking at 10ks to 100ks. Not really my specialty, I would be looking at doing it wirelessly but yeah if you need 10gbps there's not a good wireless option right now. You can get up to 2gbps reliably on licensed wireless links, but in that area (lots of rain?) You'll need short links (3-4 miles tops) and big dishes.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Reminder: Check if in your city, the municipality has empty cable tunnels to each building – in many cities, that’s a thing, and you can pull your fiber through there with a simple RC car, and usually use them for free.
        Ericson2314 10y ago
        That's a great trick, and the RC car part is hilarious.
    - shoo 10y ago
      ballpark cost of trenching for fibre installation is AUD$120 / metre. this varies quite a bit depending on what you have to trench through. may be somewhat cheaper in US than Australia due to lower labour costs. e.g. Australia's minimum hourly wage is about double that in the US. can reduce costs by ~70% if you are able to re-use existing duct / conduit in the ground, but you'd have to negotiate usage of that
atomical 10y ago
How common are regional wireless ISPs?
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Depends on the area, I'm in the US Rocky Mountain area and they're very common here. In my experience they're more common in suburbs / rural areas than urban areas.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  I know a few in my area, like Utah Broadband. And that's just from my casual knowledge.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    Yup I know the guys at Utah Broadband :) I worked at Rise broadband (used to be Digis) for about 10 years, if you know Utah Broadband you've probably heard of them? Vivint was doing some of this in Utah as well, I spent a few years with them.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      Yes to Digis, and yes to Vivint. (This reminds me...Vivint aquired SpaceMonkey and there was talk of including SM's distributed storage devices in the routers.)
      - grahamburger 10y ago
        I left Vivint about a year ago. At the time that feature was still vapor-ware :-) may have changed since then, I'm not sure.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  There was a really small one that serviced half of my apartment complex in Pleasant Grove, Utah back in 2006 or so. A colleague who lived in the same complex told me about them. I called to see if I could sign up and the guy came out to my apartment and told me that because my apartment faced the inner courtyard, I wouldn't get good service, so he couldn't sign me up. :\ The ONLY internet access available was provided by the apartment complex itself. I think they had a few T1s split between a couple hundred units. Even 10 years ago, that was still embarrassingly bad. It was unusable in the evenings or weekends. You could do a traditional ARP spoof and read everyone's traffic. Really bad stuff. I had no option but to deal. I set up a VPN to protect and compress my traffic and spent weekends at the homes of friends and family. These days, I hear wireless ISPs are far more versatile and reliable. They're great options for people who get stuck like I was (as long as your apartment points the right direction!).
wprapido 10y ago
there are many micro / local ISPs offering wireless connections in third world countries. i consulted for one in bolivia and helped start up one in serbia
- grahamburger 10y ago
  They are more common in the US than I think people realize as well. What type of equipment have you been using?
  - wprapido 10y ago
    in the states it's almost exclusively rural area i consulted them on biz and sales side so i don't remember their gear, but i remember both had quite a basic setup that worked pretty well. mind you, it was in urban areas (a 600k city in bolivia and a 2m city in serbia). serbian guys gone as far as building a file sharing network and setting up game servers
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      In the US I've had the most luck in fairly dense suburbs outside of major cities. If you get too rural it's hard to get the density where it needs to be to have decent profit margins. I honestly don't think there's any reason it couldn't work in urban areas in the US, just a different set of constraints. But it does seem to be less common.
      - Endy 10y ago
        Do you know of any just outside NYC, like in the NJ area?
        grahamburger 10y ago
        I don't, sorry I'm mostly familiar with the western US. You might try this: http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP
deleted 10y ago
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flanbiscuit 10y ago
My friend did this in the mid-90's. He had a T1 to his house (this was circa 95-97) and ran an ISP from his actual garage. It was all modem based at the time of course. Didn't think anyone could compete with the big TelCos but I'd gladly switch if I could. I'm in NYC and it seems to me that the major players here have a stronghold on the business. I could be wrong though. I have verizon fios now and it's just ok. Better than TimeWarner that I had for years until I moved.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't know that 'compete with' is the right word ... it would take a tremendous amount of work, time and money for someone to get enough customers for the big telcos to even notice. But you don't really have to be big enough to be on their radar to be successful - a few thousand customers is nothing to a Comcast, but it can make a healthy profit for a small business.
- jrcii 10y ago
  If you're in Manhattan check out Stealth Communications. They're the only way to get gigabit for a decent price, they have a direct franchise agreement with the city and own the fiber lines.
  - flanbiscuit 10y ago
    I'm out in Bushwick. I'd be all over that if I could.
mmanfrin 10y ago
WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Also, how would you go about making an ISP for a dense urban area with no real higher-than-everything-else structures? Like, say you wanted to build out fiber in Berkeley: there is dark fiber going down the middle of the city, you'd need to get a physical wire from the cable to some room where you split it out in to other cable bunches? Is most of the difficulty in doing so from the difficulty in physically putting down wires?
- grahamburger 10y ago
  > WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Not necessarily, depends on what equipment is used and what the topology of the network is. It's not impossible to get 40-50ms latency on WISP networks out to Google, which is similar to what I get on Comcast. To your second point - my specialty is wireless, but the reality is that wireless doesn't work everywhere. If there really is no single location that can see at least a few hundred homes with full line of sight then wireless probably isn't the answer. So then you're looking at fiber, and I think you're exactly right - the difficulty is in getting that wire down the last mile from the center of town (or whatever) to the customer. Sorry I don't know Berkley very well.
  - feld 10y ago
    My latency to Google with a WISP is 8ms.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  > WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Properly done, no. It depends on several factors. I have wireless links pushing hundreds of megabits per second across several miles with sub-millisecond latency.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Can't speak to a whole system perspective however radio tends to propagate faster than fiber. There was a story a while back about some HFT firm wanting to install a giant tower in a small town outside London to get lower latency into the exchanges.
Aaargh20318 10y ago
How do you make ends meet as a small ISP considering the razor-thin margins and cutthroat competition ? How do you convince consumers to switch to your service when there are dozens of alternatives ?
- koolba 10y ago
  > How do you make ends meet as a small ISP considering the razor-thin margins and cutthroat competition ? Are the margins really razor thin? I always thought I've been getting price raped for years. $100/mo to provide a service that's just a pass through doesn't seem like thin margins.
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    > Are the margins really razor thin? I pay €1/day for gigabit service, so yeah pretty thin.
- tunap 10y ago
  I know nothing of costs, but the convincing part is easy on the fringes of N Phoenix. 10's of thousands of people historically have paid good money every month to the tele-monopoly for sub-standard inet(40 year old copper delivering >200ms latency @ 1.2mb/s down on good day, if it hasn't rained recently). In the past 2 years two startups have started providing 10mb/s + wireless packages for equivalent prices and people are jumping at the new option as fast as they can "unbundle" their albatross inet from their monthly tele-monopoly bills. edit:typos
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    > I know nothing of costs, but the convincing part is easy on the fringes of N Phoenix. The convincing part is the hard part at least where I live. There's 13 different ISP that offer fiber service, a cable ISP and a dozen or so DSL providers. You can get gbit service starting at €1/day. With about two dozen ISP's available at most locations and several different plans per ISP it has become so difficult for consumers to choose that several websites have popped up allowing you to compare all the different options available at your address.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

iopuy 10y ago

For community benefit, do you think you could give us a quick summary of the stages involved? Specifically, how does one go about leasing a connection from a larger Telco? Doesn't this normally cost 10 of thousands of dollars per month?

grahamburger 10y ago
Sure! For the better part of 2015 my job was to fly in to specific markets in the US and spend 2-4 days building a plan for a wireless ISP network that would be built a few months later. I'll summarize the process that I used, perhaps that will be helpful? First I should explain that my experience is in fixed wireless networks[0] more than fiber. First, I would spend some time on Google Earth looking for good neighborhoods to serve. A good neighborhood is typically a dense suburban development with low tree growth. Then I look for potential places to put the access points to serve the area - you really need line of site (no trees) to each home to provide good service. Water tanks, mountains/hills, office buildings and even residential homes make good access point locations. Often you can negotiate a rooftop lease with a place like that for a few hundred dollars a month (or even less). You can also use commercial cell phone towers, but they're more like 1-2k/month. You really want to be able to see a few hundred rooftops within 5-10 miles of your access point location to make it worthwhile. Next you need to figure out how to get service to your access point location, like you mentioned. You really only need a few hundred mbps circuit to start though, a 1gbps circuit will last you up to a few hundred customers at least. Your first circuit shouldn't cost more than 2k to maybe 3.5k / month. The hard part is finding it in a place where you can then get it delivered to your access point location. Sometimes you get lucky and find an office building near a suburban neighborhood that already has a fiber demarc in the basement - that's a slam dunk. More often you have to lease space on an office building in the city, buy your fiber circuit there, and then use a high capacity wireless backhaul to relay the service to your access points. I would usually just drive around the main roadways looking for the orange stickered fiber whips to see where the fiber lines run, then call the company to get pricing. (can't find a photo at the moment, I'll keep looking.) Then, you just start building and signing people up. Lot's of people make the mistake of trying to go cheap on the customer install, many WISPs start by trying to install their customers with in-home radios rather than putting them on the roof. That doesn't work. Regardless of the type of equipment you use, you have to put a good radio on the roof with a reasonably high gain directional antenna pointing to your tower. The other common early pitfall is to try to use regular WiFi devices for your network. WiFi is designed to work well in buildings / office parks, not so much outside and long-ish distances. Ubiquiti equipment is a good start and very cheap, although there are better ones. The hardest part about signing up customers is paying for their equipment up front. You're looking at 250-350$ per customer installation (including amortizing infrastructure build) if you're in an area where the incumbent is really bad you can sometimes charge some of that to the customer. The ROI isn't too bad even if you eat that cost - less than a year - but it can be hard when you're starting out. The next hard part is jumping over the scaling humps. You'll need a staffed support center and NOC before you're fully able to afford it, for example. Disclaimer - this is what I'm working on know, providing a variety of the backend services that these WISPs usually need / benefit from but can't afford to build on their own. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...
- mozumder 10y ago
  How much would it cost to actually dig a line to the nearest Internet peering exchange? Just to build an underground backbone fiber line itself, in terms of cost/mile? And how different is that from a neighborhood underground line? This would be for Washington DC suburbs - Germantown, MD. I mostly want to know about the backbone-level work. We already have pretty fast Verizon FIOS, so I'm trying to figure out what it would take to go to the next level - 10gbps, etc..
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    Once you start looking at trenching fiber you're looking at 10ks to 100ks. Not really my specialty, I would be looking at doing it wirelessly but yeah if you need 10gbps there's not a good wireless option right now. You can get up to 2gbps reliably on licensed wireless links, but in that area (lots of rain?) You'll need short links (3-4 miles tops) and big dishes.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Reminder: Check if in your city, the municipality has empty cable tunnels to each building – in many cities, that’s a thing, and you can pull your fiber through there with a simple RC car, and usually use them for free.
      - Ericson2314 10y ago
        That's a great trick, and the RC car part is hilarious.
  - shoo 10y ago
    ballpark cost of trenching for fibre installation is AUD$120 / metre. this varies quite a bit depending on what you have to trench through. may be somewhat cheaper in US than Australia due to lower labour costs. e.g. Australia's minimum hourly wage is about double that in the US. can reduce costs by ~70% if you are able to re-use existing duct / conduit in the ground, but you'd have to negotiate usage of that

atomical 10y ago

How common are regional wireless ISPs?

grahamburger 10y ago
Depends on the area, I'm in the US Rocky Mountain area and they're very common here. In my experience they're more common in suburbs / rural areas than urban areas.
paulddraper 10y ago
I know a few in my area, like Utah Broadband. And that's just from my casual knowledge.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  Yup I know the guys at Utah Broadband :) I worked at Rise broadband (used to be Digis) for about 10 years, if you know Utah Broadband you've probably heard of them? Vivint was doing some of this in Utah as well, I spent a few years with them.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Yes to Digis, and yes to Vivint. (This reminds me...Vivint aquired SpaceMonkey and there was talk of including SM's distributed storage devices in the routers.)
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      I left Vivint about a year ago. At the time that feature was still vapor-ware :-) may have changed since then, I'm not sure.
cookiecaper 10y ago
There was a really small one that serviced half of my apartment complex in Pleasant Grove, Utah back in 2006 or so. A colleague who lived in the same complex told me about them. I called to see if I could sign up and the guy came out to my apartment and told me that because my apartment faced the inner courtyard, I wouldn't get good service, so he couldn't sign me up. :\ The ONLY internet access available was provided by the apartment complex itself. I think they had a few T1s split between a couple hundred units. Even 10 years ago, that was still embarrassingly bad. It was unusable in the evenings or weekends. You could do a traditional ARP spoof and read everyone's traffic. Really bad stuff. I had no option but to deal. I set up a VPN to protect and compress my traffic and spent weekends at the homes of friends and family. These days, I hear wireless ISPs are far more versatile and reliable. They're great options for people who get stuck like I was (as long as your apartment points the right direction!).

wprapido 10y ago

there are many micro / local ISPs offering wireless connections in third world countries. i consulted for one in bolivia and helped start up one in serbia

grahamburger 10y ago
They are more common in the US than I think people realize as well. What type of equipment have you been using?
- wprapido 10y ago
  in the states it's almost exclusively rural area i consulted them on biz and sales side so i don't remember their gear, but i remember both had quite a basic setup that worked pretty well. mind you, it was in urban areas (a 600k city in bolivia and a 2m city in serbia). serbian guys gone as far as building a file sharing network and setting up game servers
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    In the US I've had the most luck in fairly dense suburbs outside of major cities. If you get too rural it's hard to get the density where it needs to be to have decent profit margins. I honestly don't think there's any reason it couldn't work in urban areas in the US, just a different set of constraints. But it does seem to be less common.
    - Endy 10y ago
      Do you know of any just outside NYC, like in the NJ area?
      - grahamburger 10y ago
        I don't, sorry I'm mostly familiar with the western US. You might try this: http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

flanbiscuit 10y ago

My friend did this in the mid-90's. He had a T1 to his house (this was circa 95-97) and ran an ISP from his actual garage. It was all modem based at the time of course. Didn't think anyone could compete with the big TelCos but I'd gladly switch if I could. I'm in NYC and it seems to me that the major players here have a stronghold on the business. I could be wrong though. I have verizon fios now and it's just ok. Better than TimeWarner that I had for years until I moved.

grahamburger 10y ago
Yeah, I don't know that 'compete with' is the right word ... it would take a tremendous amount of work, time and money for someone to get enough customers for the big telcos to even notice. But you don't really have to be big enough to be on their radar to be successful - a few thousand customers is nothing to a Comcast, but it can make a healthy profit for a small business.
jrcii 10y ago
If you're in Manhattan check out Stealth Communications. They're the only way to get gigabit for a decent price, they have a direct franchise agreement with the city and own the fiber lines.
- flanbiscuit 10y ago
  I'm out in Bushwick. I'd be all over that if I could.

mmanfrin 10y ago

WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Also, how would you go about making an ISP for a dense urban area with no real higher-than-everything-else structures? Like, say you wanted to build out fiber in Berkeley: there is dark fiber going down the middle of the city, you'd need to get a physical wire from the cable to some room where you split it out in to other cable bunches? Is most of the difficulty in doing so from the difficulty in physically putting down wires?

grahamburger 10y ago
> WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Not necessarily, depends on what equipment is used and what the topology of the network is. It's not impossible to get 40-50ms latency on WISP networks out to Google, which is similar to what I get on Comcast. To your second point - my specialty is wireless, but the reality is that wireless doesn't work everywhere. If there really is no single location that can see at least a few hundred homes with full line of sight then wireless probably isn't the answer. So then you're looking at fiber, and I think you're exactly right - the difficulty is in getting that wire down the last mile from the center of town (or whatever) to the customer. Sorry I don't know Berkley very well.
- feld 10y ago
  My latency to Google with a WISP is 8ms.
jlgaddis 10y ago
> WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct? Properly done, no. It depends on several factors. I have wireless links pushing hundreds of megabits per second across several miles with sub-millisecond latency.
vvanders 10y ago
Can't speak to a whole system perspective however radio tends to propagate faster than fiber. There was a story a while back about some HFT firm wanting to install a giant tower in a small town outside London to get lower latency into the exchanges.

Aaargh20318 10y ago

How do you make ends meet as a small ISP considering the razor-thin margins and cutthroat competition ? How do you convince consumers to switch to your service when there are dozens of alternatives ?

koolba 10y ago
> How do you make ends meet as a small ISP considering the razor-thin margins and cutthroat competition ? Are the margins really razor thin? I always thought I've been getting price raped for years. $100/mo to provide a service that's just a pass through doesn't seem like thin margins.
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  > Are the margins really razor thin? I pay €1/day for gigabit service, so yeah pretty thin.
tunap 10y ago
I know nothing of costs, but the convincing part is easy on the fringes of N Phoenix. 10's of thousands of people historically have paid good money every month to the tele-monopoly for sub-standard inet(40 year old copper delivering >200ms latency @ 1.2mb/s down on good day, if it hasn't rained recently). In the past 2 years two startups have started providing 10mb/s + wireless packages for equivalent prices and people are jumping at the new option as fast as they can "unbundle" their albatross inet from their monthly tele-monopoly bills. edit:typos
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  > I know nothing of costs, but the convincing part is easy on the fringes of N Phoenix. The convincing part is the hard part at least where I live. There's 13 different ISP that offer fiber service, a cable ISP and a dozen or so DSL providers. You can get gbit service starting at €1/day. With about two dozen ISP's available at most locations and several different plans per ISP it has become so difficult for consumers to choose that several websites have popped up allowing you to compare all the different options available at your address.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]