48 ms·

Start Your Own ISP

607 points by maxwell 5y ago

walrus01 5y ago
I would caution against just jumping into this and trying to be a real ISP if your experience is in software development, sysadmin stuff, or something kind of tech industry adjacent but you've never worked for an ISP in a NOC environment, as a junior network engineer or similar for somebody else's medium to large sized ISP. There's a lot of missteps that can be made without experience. In general I would recommend thinking of starting a small ISP as a depth and breadth of knowledge base you need to develop, similar to how an apprentice electrician is expected to work under some more senior/experienced persons in their field for a number of years before being able to operate independently. I do not want to discourage anyone but I've seen a myriad of 'oh my god why did they do that' small WISPs with anywhere from 50 to 1500 customers. Going down the wrong network architecture/topology/business plan path can be very costly later on if you're 100% learning as you go. Overall I think a site like this is a great idea, but the sheer scope of things that would need to be written down in a wiki-like format for everything to start your own ISP, and what systems/subsystems/technologies you will want to be familiar with, could fill thousands of pages if printed in book form. It's a gargantuan task to make a website that has everything needed to start an ISP from scratch, assuming the reader hasn't been involved in somebody else's ISP operations first.
- Exuma 5y ago
  What type of profit potential is there to doing this? Seems like good stable income, but I also see lots of downsides with literally not knowing how anything works (and not being an engineer). There would be an awful lot of new information to learn, so the profit potential would really need to be there.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    That would vary wildly by geographical location and whether it's some place that has no WISP at all right now, population density, competition, terrain and tree cover, number of houses, etc. I'm skeptical about the idea of starting a very small WISP right now, one could easily spend $40-50,000 on basic infrastructure for a small area and not be able to compete in nines of reliability/uptime and speeds with Starlink.
    - calgoo 5y ago
      Exactly, you need to have access to tall buildings / towers etc with fiber. The cost of putting a couple of antennas on a tower can basically eat up any profit you would get. You are also competing with LTE/5G, and one storm can wipe out half your infrastructure in an afternoon.
      - Exuma 5y ago
        Heh, I can't imagine that feeling when you have really no idea what you're doing, you have 50 paying customers, and then all your equipment goes down. This sounds nightmarish unless you are some sort of electrical engineer
        walrus01 5y ago
        As a one-man WISP responsible for everything at the physical level and the logical/IP configuration of the network, monitoring systems, billing systems, customer support systems etc you are also trapped in a personal hell of never being able to go on vacation and on-call 24x7x365. There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.
        vidarh 5y ago
        My first company was an ISP. There were 4 of us. We were around 19. No business experience. No networking experience. How hard could it be, right? I configured my first router by calling our provider and saying we'd set things up but something was wrong, and having them echo to me what they did on their side so I could "check" our side - they charged for the setup, but this way we got it for free. We literally lived in the office for the first year, and one of my most entertaining experiences was answering the phone at 2am on a Sunday morning and the person on the other end expressing surprise that someone answered - they'd just called out of sheer desperation and expected it to ring forever. Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorising us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package - something the person talking to him found out call by call, while the rest of us tried to not audibly laugh, because surely nobody could be that stupid? (a "learning experience" - it was how I came to understand why support people ask all those really obvious "stupid" questions. I can't make up my mind if all the network issues were the worst part, or if the support calls were. This was 26 years ago, and I have just about gotten over the soul-sucking parts of it by now. I even contemplated setting up a local ISP again... I don't know why.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Author here. I see your posts often and have a lot of respect for you as someone who obviously has a deeper knowledge of networking than I probably every will. That being said I don't really agree that a person necessarily needs a ton a networking or even any technical background to start a WISP, any more than they necessarily need a ton of experience as a cook to start a restaurant. They definitely need employees or advisors who have that experience, but like you allude to here probably no one can have all of the knowledge to so it themselves upfront. Also I've also seen a lot of WISPs with a myriad of problems as they grow from a few dozen to a few hundred customers, many of them are able to make that transition, fix their problems, and either grow or be acquired. This seems basically the same as any industry - if everyone waited until they knew exactly what they're doing no one would start anything. All of this said, starting a WISP isn't for everyone. I talk to a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting an ISP, and often my best, honest advice is that it's not a great idea in their situation.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    Does your site have a section that covers the legal steps a person should follow to protect themselves and their small business? i.e. incorporating their business, business insurance specific to a WISP, processes to follow to ensure legal compliance, what data to log and not log, log retention policies, consumer disclosure, frameworks to put in place for law enforcement requests, agreements to have in place for the upstream fiber provider, etc...
    - grahamburger 5y ago
      There's a little bit of that in there. Surprisingly, in the U.S. at least, there's not much of a gap between being a legal business entity (LLC, corp) and being able to be an ISP. You don't have to log much of anything (unless you're doing voice services as well). You do have to be able to intercept customer traffic without going on site physically in order to comply with law enforcement requests. But as someone who is not a lawyer and has no business giving legal advice the best I can do is suggest that you talk to a real lawyer.
- williesleg 5y ago
  An ISP is only for governments to build
- Black101 5y ago
  > I would caution against just jumping into this I don't think that anyone needs caution warnings about starting an ISP... more then likely they know that it isn't like drinking a cup of coffee.
jjice 5y ago
While this is something I would never take on for a handful of reasons, this is extremely cool in concept and this would be an incredibly fun project to put together.
yitchelle 5y ago
Had a colleague that ran an a very small scale ISP. It was back in the day when the country is transitioning between dialup and broadband. Needless to say that it was very short lived.
stevehawk 5y ago
Is there really any future in small ISPs now that Starlink and its competitors are being launched?
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Author here. This is definitely something some WISPs are worried about. It's likely that Starlink will take a lot of the most rural customers. WISPs can also be very successful in more suburban environments, and can speeds much higher than Starlink can provide in suburbia (300-500mbps) at a lower cost, so there will probably be a place for WISPs at least until there is no gap between fiber availability and Starlink as the best option. Also, a lot of WISPs have started running fiber in rural areas, so that's another way they can stay relevant.
- maven29 5y ago
  Starlink only has permission for 5 million user terminals at the moment.
  - martinald 5y ago
    That's a lot? Something like 120m US households, so it's nearly 5% penetration.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      it's nothing to laugh at, but at the same time would i consider an isp with 5% penetration to be rather small or insignificant in the greater sheme.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  starlink is in no way a competitor to a modern ISP, on a modern ISP it's normal to have >=1Gbit and more than 10 times less of a latency compared to starlink, and the maximum potential userbase for starlink is a fraction of internet userbase
  - 5y ago
grahamburger 5y ago
Hi folks, author of startyourownisp.com here. Not sure why we hit the front page today, but happy to be here! I'll try to hang around and answer questions for the next few hours. Thanks!
- tomschlick 5y ago
  It's probably in relation to the push to ban municipal ISPs in Ohio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27538804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27538804
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Does SYOISP overlap (tech-wise) with the efforts of those at https://www.meshcenter.org/ https://www.meshcenter.org/ who are really trailblazing it in NYC and Baltimore? Also, is SYOISP closer to what https://starry.com/ https://starry.com/ has deployed? Thanks.
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    Related in both cases. SYOISP describes what I, as a somewhat opinionated author, believe to be the absolute minimum amount of information required to build a business that can be called an ISP. To the extent that the companies involved in meshcenter.org and also Starry are ISPs, there is definitely overlap.
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      > SYOISP describes what I, as a somewhat opinionated author, believe to be the absolute minimum amount of information required to build a business that can be called an ISP. Thanks. Then, what'd you say are key differences between meshcenter.org and syoisp? Curious because meshcenter goes for maintainability and affordability too, from what I gather. Also, has Facebook's foray into the space with https://telecominfraproject.com https://telecominfraproject.com (and Google's too with https://opennetworking.org/ https://opennetworking.org/) change the landscape? They're going after 4G/5G like deployments, which is in sharp contrast with what starry and meshcenter are doing?
markonen 5y ago
Over the last year or so the company I run moved some content delivery workloads from a CDN onto our own network. So now we have something like 100Gbit/s of total external bandwidth. The next thought in my addled brain is that since we only really use the egress side of it, perhaps some of our neighbors would enjoy affordable 10G internet access…
- grahamburger 5y ago
  (Author here) Maybe possible to figure out a way to use this. The problem is the people using it would still need transport to your network, which in practice can cost as much or nearly as much as direct DIA to their location. The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs? I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.
  - toast0 5y ago
    The tricky bit is that a CDN doesn't really want geographic distribution so much as to be close to network distribution points. If a WISP's customers aren't enough to warrant a CDN node and their internet backhaul is fiber to a not particularly nearby internet exchange point, there's not a whole lot of benefit to the CDN to be at the WISP rather than the internet exchange. It might be different if the WISP has connections to local residential ISPs that aren't well connected to local internet exchanges (or there nearest internet exchange isn't very near) so the WISP facility offers a way to get (network) closer to more users. I could also see some potential for mixing traffic streams between a WISP (or several) and a CDN to try to balance traffic flows enough to qualify for peering with networks with restrictive peering policies; however, they also often have geographic requirements that might be harder to meet.
    - grahamburger 5y ago
      Thanks, this helps to confirm what I've always expected from my end (the wisp side.) It sure seems like a good match at a high level but seems to fall apart once we get in to the details of making it work.
amichal 5y ago
Having done this informally many years ago for a dozen neighbors in a village before we got decent broadband I can relate. People get real weird and twitching when there internet is out and there is nothing like being woken up at 6am on a Sunday with a "customer" in you bedroom ranting that the INTERNET IS DOWN. Or having to bust the kid who hid a wifi repeater in the village library to torrent gigabytes of "ISOs" over our tiny 1.5Mbit connection
- bombcar 5y ago
  People handle power failures more gracefully than they do internet outages.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    I moved to a new apartment and forgot to set up an account for electricity so my power was shut off for a day and a half. The most interesting thing was how it actually didn't bother me too much because I still had my phone with mobile data, if I didn't have any form of internet connection that would have been _much_ more of a hassle since I wouldn't have even been able to access the energy company website to resolve the issue.
runningskull 5y ago
Related and fun: the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange[1]. The person who started it has a great blog[2] about all kinds of related things. There’s a really good interview[3] with him about how it started and what it takes to run it on the On The Metal podcast (highly recommended in general) 1: https://fcix.net https://fcix.net 2: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com 3: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Your link #3 was an amazing listen! Thank you to share.
sfgweilr4f 5y ago
I think starlink is going to seriously mess with these kinds of businesses. Anyone with real knowledge care to chime in?
- twiclo 5y ago
  I work for a wisp as a software engineer. I'm knowledgeable enough about our network/prices. None of the network engineers believe the numbers spacex is claiming they can do yet they can see it right in front of their eyes. The main argument is, "Well once this network actually gets any load it'll crumble." Or, "The latency is going to be through the roof." But people who live where a WISP is their only option already don't care about latency all that much. I can't definitively say this is going to be disruptive but I can tell they're nervous. From my perspective the future of rural internet is in space.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    I work in networking but not for an ISP. I have worked in networking for a long time. To me, Starlink looks like a very typical Musk venture - vastly, vastly overhyped. As someone who would like to move to a more rural area, it appeals to me, but the numbers don't work. The _total planned switching capacity_ of the starlink constellation, and I emphasize planned because the current capacity is kind of a joke, is approximately that of a single current generation multi-linecard network switch. And that's assuming they do in-space switching, which at the moment they do not, and to my knowledge none of the current satellites are even capable of doing so in a non-experimental production capacity. They also have very significant routing challenges if they ever do that (and even if they don't). Worse, the skinny end of the pipe is on the wrong side of the satellites, so even things like caches are not really going to help them. It just isn't even remotely possible that Starlink is going to provide the current level of service once they get any kind of significant user uptake. The bandwidth per spot is too low and the spots are too large. I personally think that half the Starlink story (inter-satellite switching) is going to be SpaceX's "full self driving." Unlike FSD, SpaceX has an easy out - they will build out enough ground station coverage that they don't need to do inter-satellite switching except for the air/sea cases and those markets they may simply abandon. The true innovation of Starlink is that their ground stations are dirt cheap, but that's not a sexy story.
no_time 5y ago
It's a small miracle our local isp stayed afloat. Service was so flaky for a decade and a half that I could tell the weather outside by the lagspikes and speed drops. A few years ago he won some national/EU grant and now he operates a village wide fiber network. Probably the biggest infrastructure upgrade since the introduction of tapwater/sewage in the 70's.
icedchai 5y ago
I helped build a couple of ISPs in the 90's, back when upgrading from a 56K leased line to a T1 was considered a right of passage. Fun times. Not sure I'd want to go back. Seems hard to compete with the cable company in high density areas. Maybe a WISP if I was out in the boonies...
smoldesu 5y ago
My family bought internet from a small ISP nearby who had done the same thing. We paid ~$100/month for WISP access, with ~10% downtime, 500ms of latency (at lowest), and 500kb down. It was a nightmare, and my siblings performance in school started tanking as they couldn't access homework or lectures from home. We eventually switched to Starlink, which has been a 100x improvement, both literally and figuratively. Please, nobody ever start your own ISP. It absolutely sucks to use your infrastructure.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Author of startyourownisp.com here. Your experience is unfortunate and definitely not unique, but also not universal or I would say even the norm for WISPs. I'm personally involved in running a few different ISPs in rural parts of the U.S. and Mexico. In all cases we are providing 100mbps+ service with <20ms latency to most of the Internet.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'll take your word for it, but I'm definitely not switching back from Starlink any time soon. We had more issues with our old provider in a week than we've had in 3 months of Starlink service.
    - snypher 5y ago
      I'm glad SpaceX didn't take your advice!
myfavoritedog 5y ago
Built an ISP back in the mid-90’s with some friends as a startup. Dial-up, ISDN, Frame Relay, DSL, etc. My one piece of advice is to not overestimate sales. We engineering types tend to underestimate how hard it can be to sell things. We love the “build it and they will come” fantasy. The real world rarely works that way, especially for something as run-of-the-mill these days as internet service.
nedrocks 5y ago
This is so interesting! I noticed a sign while driving yesterday that was unbranded saying "high speed internet" and an arbitrary local phone number. I presumed it could be a reseller but my mind started turning on how I could create an ISP and what that process looks like. Next morning I see this. I don't think I would execute on this personally because of the support required -- the spreadsheet takes into account the building but less so the maintaining. I would struggle to be hated as much as people fume at ISPs when their service is impacted.
Naac 5y ago
> How Much Do I need? > You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800 No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I don't think my community is better served by having yet another oversubscribed Comcast-like ISP ( even though its run by individuals )
- bombcar 5y ago
  Any ISP that charges less than Datacenter transit rates (something like $200/mo per gigabit) is oversubscribed. And even those rates at hurricane electric are oversubscribed simply because it doesn’t make sense to pay for unused transit.
  - marcus0x62 5y ago
    All IP networks are oversubscribed, even the ones charging "datacenter transit rates". The difference, in this respect at least, is that good providers monitor utilization and proactively upgrade capacity.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      It would be interesting for ISPs (especially municipal or small ones) to have a live graph showing ingress/outgress on their various routers and lines. There’s also “soft” limits (currently we pay for 10G on this fiber line that could do 1000G) vs hard limits (we are at 1G on this 1G copper connection).
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Over subscription makes complete sense because virtually no one maxes out their connection all the time so it makes sense to not reserve the maximum speed for every customer. My ISP lets you see a chart showing the nearest node's current usage and its capacity so you can see it just tap the top of the capacity each day at peak streaming hour and then spend most of the day almost unused.
    - tsjq 5y ago
seaorg 5y ago
Starlink doesn’t change anything, it’s not for dense coverage. Not too much overlap with WISP. Revolutionary in other ways though. The main problem with this way of transmitting is that you are on unregulated parts of the radio spectrum. So there’s nothing stopping someone from jamming your equipment, grinding everything to a halt, whether it’s on purpose or by accident. Maybe in practice it’s rare, but it’s too big a vulnerability for me to invest in such a business. I was wondering about laser modems. It could never be jammed without some kind of expensive and conspicuous physical intervention. I would feel much more comfortable investing in that even if lasers were more expensive or a pain in the ass. Not that it matters. 5G is going to put all these guys out of business.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  (Author here) > The main problem with this way of transmitting is that you are on unregulated parts of the radio spectrum. Traditionally this is true and is still mostly true today, but a ton of WISPs picked up PAL licenses in the CBRS band and are using that. Also, as you mentioned, in practice "jamming" equipment is uncommon (and very illegal!) Also I always recommend that folks use licensed or FCC registered links for their wireless backhaul, which limits the amount problems you'll get from interference. > I was wondering about laser modems. It could never be jammed without some kind of expensive and conspicuous physical intervention. I would feel much more comfortable investing in that even if lasers were more expensive or a pain in the ass. I've used some of these device (called "open air optical.") They're ok for very short range connections, but over anything more than a few hundred yards the performance of wireless is much better. > Not that it matters. 5G is going to put all these guys out of business. As a WISP you have the option of deploying 5G networks. It's expensive, but might be worth it. Many, many WISPs (myself included), operate fixed 4G LTE networks, and 5G is the next step. I haven't dabbled in 5G yet, but I have sales people calling me somewhat regularly ready to sell the gear. To the extent that 5G will live up to it's promises, WISPs are well positioned to take advantage of it.
  - delabay 5y ago
    Just because you mentioned 5G CBRS: Freedomfi (https://freedomfi.com/ https://freedomfi.com/) is selling hardware later this year which will allow you to become your own cell tower for 5G CBRS bands, based on Facebook's magma project. You can backhaul a 5G modem/antenna, offload to a major MNO/MVNO, and get paid $.50 per gb consumption, paid in Helium HNT crypto (yes, crypto). Its still a big work in progress but could totally unlock private deployments of 5G networks and make them almost as easy as setting up wifi.
alksjdalkj 5y ago
It seems like there should be a lot of potential for something like this in cities. The site says that line of sight and apartment buildings are problems but in the east coast cities I'm familiar with there's lots of neighborhoods consisting mainly of row homes or 2-3 story multifamily houses. To me places like neighborhoods like those would be a natural fit, more so than suburbs. Also for me the main appeal of this is the potential for a not for profit, co-op style ISP. I.e. owned and operated by the customers. Although if the fiber is still coming from a Comcast or Verizon I'm not sure how different it would be vs. just buying consumer internet direct from Comcast/Verizon.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Could be! East coast has traditionally been hard for WISPs because of trees. Recently I've been doing a proof of concept in Georgia, though, and had a lot of success even with tree cover. Would love to try out a few more of these places that have traditionally been hard for WISPs. (Author here.)
  - kfajdsl 5y ago
    > Recently I've been doing a proof of concept in Georgia Can you disclose where in Georgia? I'm just curious as a resident of the state ;)
    - grahamburger 5y ago
      I can share these news articles! https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/06/start-your-own-isp-lowers-barrier-to-establishing-wireless-internet-service-providers/ https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/06/start-your-own-isp-lo... https://www.wfxg.com/story/43745096/georgia-cyber-center-works-to-bring-broadband-to-rural-parts-of-state https://www.wfxg.com/story/43745096/georgia-cyber-center-wor...
deleted 5y ago
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dimitrit 5y ago
I would love to see a guide on how to setup a 5G network
- delabay 5y ago
  This is now possible with the advent of CBRS. https://freedomfi.com/ https://freedomfi.com/ is selling hardware later this year which will allow you to become your own cell tower for 5G CBRS bands. You'll get paid $.50 per gb consumption, paid in Helium HNT crypto (yes, crypto). Its still a big work in progress but could totally unlock private deployments of 5G networks and make them almost as easy as setting up wifi.
mikewarot 5y ago
I thought this was going to be a game reliving my experience as the System Administrator at our local dialup internet service back in the 1990s. I wasn't there at the start, but I ran the thing for 2 years, serving about 200 customers. I wrote the "Internet Installation" floppy disks that people used to install networking on Windows 3.1, and configured dialup icons on their desktop. I was the ONLY technical support they had. I learned that people don't use the same words we technical folks do, so if you get a support call and ask "Have you installed anything?" the answer they give is no, but, if you ask "do you have any new programs or stuff", the answer will be yes. Why? - My theory is that they either didn't know what "installing" was (nobody opened up the computer to put something in), or they themselves didn't do it. You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway. If you're going to be an ISP, you're going to be on call 24/7/365, and you're going to see weird shit. More than once we had to deal with people wanting to post adult content for money.... and this was back in the days of dialup. Who knows what the heck the folks are doing today.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  (Author here) This is great, you can't see me but I'm laughing with you! :) I have sometimes considered making this in to a game, actually. It could have some fun territory and financial mechanics. But the more I think about it the more it seems like work, and the less I want to play it! To be realistic it would have to wake you up at 3AM and make you pull pants on and drive out to the bottom of a tower in a muddy field that smells like chicken shit to drop in a generator. While it's <0 F˚ outside.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    I work in electricity brokering. Can relate to having to install networking infrastructure in below zero weather :)
- quercusa 5y ago
  This is a great point: > You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway. Back in the day, I would get called in to support a SCSI-connected external device. If you asked "Is the cable connected?" the answer was always "Yes", and sometimes "Do you think I'm a moron? Of course it's connected!". So we started asking them reach around the back of the device and unplug the cable, wait 10s, then plug it in again. This was usually followed by a sound of surprise as they realized that, wotta ya know, the cable wasn't connected.
godman_8 5y ago
I honestly feel like starting a WISP is risky right now. Companies like Starlink and T-Mobile have the money and infrastructure to compete and solve a lot of problems that WISPs have.
zekica 5y ago
has anyone thought about bufferbloat in wisp setting? my experience is that some manufacturers are way better than others and there is no way to compare them based on any specs. OpenWRT is the gold standard for fighting bufferbloat, but not many manufacturers even consider using algorithms and driver patches that can help... For example, Ubiquity still uses ancient 2.6 linux kernel with some backported funcionality while mikrotik has the same base but don't even try.
- dboreham 5y ago
  A WISP would set up interface queues properly.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    some would, but most only start to bother with queueing once they have a problem and that usually is too late from a customer perspective.
29athrowaway 5y ago
If you want to start your own ISP, lawyer up.
- dboreham 5y ago
  How so? (Ran a small ISP for a decade, never dealt with a legal issue).
traceroute66 5y ago
Start Your Own ISP ? To be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind was "good luck getting an IPv4 range in 2021". ;-) The second thought was. Don't bother unless you've got a clear competitive differentiator. There are already too many ISPs out there as it is without another "me too" cluttering up the market.
- avipars 5y ago
  the only place that would make sense would be someplace deserted or underserved... But spacex is rolling out their solution
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Most new ISPs now just use CG-NAT and put a thousand customers on a single IP.
- tsjq 5y ago
  genuinely curious: isn't the real world not yet ready for pure IPv6 ?
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > isn't the real world not yet ready for pure IPv6 ? Unfortunatley not. I can name a number of mid-to-large sized ISPs in major "western" countries who are still not able to give their customers IPv6, and the worst offenders haven't even finished deploying IPv6 on their core networks ! Fortunatley that number is diminishing as the months and years go by, but for now we are still in a world where you're going to struggle setting up a new ISP if you don't have any IPv4.
avipars 5y ago
Wouldn't SpaceX's solution essentially solve this... You just need to sign up and point the device they gave you to a satellite
mahathu 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments) Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments) There have been other threads on this general theme but I don't remember what they were; anyone?
- LukeShu 5y ago
  Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband–so he built his own fiber ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753360 - Jan 2021 (7 comments) 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978544 - May 2018 (230 comments) I was sure there was a thread about Mauch that got more traction, but I can't seem to find it.
netman21 5y ago
Nice. I started an ISP in 1993. I was not a network engineer. I was an automotive engineer. It was the most intense learning curve I have ever been on. Back then you could find lots of people willing to help out who knew everything about networking. I went on later to dabble in ecommerce by publishing the ISP Business Plan. A word template and spreadsheet to get you started. Dozens of ISPs around the world used it when they started up. This site feels like the extension of that. Still a good business to get into if you don't mind being stressed by the weather. :-)
matttproud 5y ago
Please remove my memories of an acquintance who lived and slept in a warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis (before that part of town gentrified) running Intuitive Networking Solutions (INGS) during the mid- to late-1990s: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025915/http://www.ings.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025915/http://www.ings.c... I wonder what happened to the the guy (searches Google for the then-proprietor Mimbach). :closes laptop and throws it out window:
- parsecs 5y ago
  I'm curious, do you happen to have any stories and stuff to tell about him? (Hope you live on the first floor so you can still use the defenestrated laptop)

607 points by maxwell 5y ago

I would caution against just jumping into this and trying to be a real ISP if your experience is in software development, sysadmin stuff, or something kind of tech industry adjacent but you've never worked for an ISP in a NOC environment, as a junior network engineer or similar for somebody else's medium to large sized ISP. There's a lot of missteps that can be made without experience. In general I would recommend thinking of starting a small ISP as a depth and breadth of knowledge base you need to develop, similar to how an apprentice electrician is expected to work under some more senior/experienced persons in their field for a number of years before being able to operate independently. I do not want to discourage anyone but I've seen a myriad of 'oh my god why did they do that' small WISPs with anywhere from 50 to 1500 customers. Going down the wrong network architecture/topology/business plan path can be very costly later on if you're 100% learning as you go. Overall I think a site like this is a great idea, but the sheer scope of things that would need to be written down in a wiki-like format for everything to start your own ISP, and what systems/subsystems/technologies you will want to be familiar with, could fill thousands of pages if printed in book form. It's a gargantuan task to make a website that has everything needed to start an ISP from scratch, assuming the reader hasn't been involved in somebody else's ISP operations first.

Exuma 5y ago
What type of profit potential is there to doing this? Seems like good stable income, but I also see lots of downsides with literally not knowing how anything works (and not being an engineer). There would be an awful lot of new information to learn, so the profit potential would really need to be there.
- walrus01 5y ago
  That would vary wildly by geographical location and whether it's some place that has no WISP at all right now, population density, competition, terrain and tree cover, number of houses, etc. I'm skeptical about the idea of starting a very small WISP right now, one could easily spend $40-50,000 on basic infrastructure for a small area and not be able to compete in nines of reliability/uptime and speeds with Starlink.
  - calgoo 5y ago
    Exactly, you need to have access to tall buildings / towers etc with fiber. The cost of putting a couple of antennas on a tower can basically eat up any profit you would get. You are also competing with LTE/5G, and one storm can wipe out half your infrastructure in an afternoon.
    - Exuma 5y ago
      Heh, I can't imagine that feeling when you have really no idea what you're doing, you have 50 paying customers, and then all your equipment goes down. This sounds nightmarish unless you are some sort of electrical engineer
      - walrus01 5y ago
        As a one-man WISP responsible for everything at the physical level and the logical/IP configuration of the network, monitoring systems, billing systems, customer support systems etc you are also trapped in a personal hell of never being able to go on vacation and on-call 24x7x365. There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.
        vidarh 5y ago
        My first company was an ISP. There were 4 of us. We were around 19. No business experience. No networking experience. How hard could it be, right? I configured my first router by calling our provider and saying we'd set things up but something was wrong, and having them echo to me what they did on their side so I could "check" our side - they charged for the setup, but this way we got it for free. We literally lived in the office for the first year, and one of my most entertaining experiences was answering the phone at 2am on a Sunday morning and the person on the other end expressing surprise that someone answered - they'd just called out of sheer desperation and expected it to ring forever. Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorising us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package - something the person talking to him found out call by call, while the rest of us tried to not audibly laugh, because surely nobody could be that stupid? (a "learning experience" - it was how I came to understand why support people ask all those really obvious "stupid" questions. I can't make up my mind if all the network issues were the worst part, or if the support calls were. This was 26 years ago, and I have just about gotten over the soul-sucking parts of it by now. I even contemplated setting up a local ISP again... I don't know why.
grahamburger 5y ago
Author here. I see your posts often and have a lot of respect for you as someone who obviously has a deeper knowledge of networking than I probably every will. That being said I don't really agree that a person necessarily needs a ton a networking or even any technical background to start a WISP, any more than they necessarily need a ton of experience as a cook to start a restaurant. They definitely need employees or advisors who have that experience, but like you allude to here probably no one can have all of the knowledge to so it themselves upfront. Also I've also seen a lot of WISPs with a myriad of problems as they grow from a few dozen to a few hundred customers, many of them are able to make that transition, fix their problems, and either grow or be acquired. This seems basically the same as any industry - if everyone waited until they knew exactly what they're doing no one would start anything. All of this said, starting a WISP isn't for everyone. I talk to a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting an ISP, and often my best, honest advice is that it's not a great idea in their situation.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  Does your site have a section that covers the legal steps a person should follow to protect themselves and their small business? i.e. incorporating their business, business insurance specific to a WISP, processes to follow to ensure legal compliance, what data to log and not log, log retention policies, consumer disclosure, frameworks to put in place for law enforcement requests, agreements to have in place for the upstream fiber provider, etc...
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    There's a little bit of that in there. Surprisingly, in the U.S. at least, there's not much of a gap between being a legal business entity (LLC, corp) and being able to be an ISP. You don't have to log much of anything (unless you're doing voice services as well). You do have to be able to intercept customer traffic without going on site physically in order to comply with law enforcement requests. But as someone who is not a lawyer and has no business giving legal advice the best I can do is suggest that you talk to a real lawyer.
williesleg 5y ago
An ISP is only for governments to build
Black101 5y ago
> I would caution against just jumping into this I don't think that anyone needs caution warnings about starting an ISP... more then likely they know that it isn't like drinking a cup of coffee.

jjice 5y ago

While this is something I would never take on for a handful of reasons, this is extremely cool in concept and this would be an incredibly fun project to put together.

yitchelle 5y ago

Had a colleague that ran an a very small scale ISP. It was back in the day when the country is transitioning between dialup and broadband. Needless to say that it was very short lived.

stevehawk 5y ago

Is there really any future in small ISPs now that Starlink and its competitors are being launched?

grahamburger 5y ago
Author here. This is definitely something some WISPs are worried about. It's likely that Starlink will take a lot of the most rural customers. WISPs can also be very successful in more suburban environments, and can speeds much higher than Starlink can provide in suburbia (300-500mbps) at a lower cost, so there will probably be a place for WISPs at least until there is no gap between fiber availability and Starlink as the best option. Also, a lot of WISPs have started running fiber in rural areas, so that's another way they can stay relevant.
maven29 5y ago
Starlink only has permission for 5 million user terminals at the moment.
- martinald 5y ago
  That's a lot? Something like 120m US households, so it's nearly 5% penetration.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    it's nothing to laugh at, but at the same time would i consider an isp with 5% penetration to be rather small or insignificant in the greater sheme.
seniorivn 5y ago
starlink is in no way a competitor to a modern ISP, on a modern ISP it's normal to have >=1Gbit and more than 10 times less of a latency compared to starlink, and the maximum potential userbase for starlink is a fraction of internet userbase
- 5y ago

grahamburger 5y ago

Hi folks, author of startyourownisp.com here. Not sure why we hit the front page today, but happy to be here! I'll try to hang around and answer questions for the next few hours. Thanks!

tomschlick 5y ago
It's probably in relation to the push to ban municipal ISPs in Ohio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27538804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27538804
ignoramous 5y ago
Does SYOISP overlap (tech-wise) with the efforts of those at https://www.meshcenter.org/ https://www.meshcenter.org/ who are really trailblazing it in NYC and Baltimore? Also, is SYOISP closer to what https://starry.com/ https://starry.com/ has deployed? Thanks.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Related in both cases. SYOISP describes what I, as a somewhat opinionated author, believe to be the absolute minimum amount of information required to build a business that can be called an ISP. To the extent that the companies involved in meshcenter.org and also Starry are ISPs, there is definitely overlap.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    > SYOISP describes what I, as a somewhat opinionated author, believe to be the absolute minimum amount of information required to build a business that can be called an ISP. Thanks. Then, what'd you say are key differences between meshcenter.org and syoisp? Curious because meshcenter goes for maintainability and affordability too, from what I gather. Also, has Facebook's foray into the space with https://telecominfraproject.com https://telecominfraproject.com (and Google's too with https://opennetworking.org/ https://opennetworking.org/) change the landscape? They're going after 4G/5G like deployments, which is in sharp contrast with what starry and meshcenter are doing?

markonen 5y ago

Over the last year or so the company I run moved some content delivery workloads from a CDN onto our own network. So now we have something like 100Gbit/s of total external bandwidth. The next thought in my addled brain is that since we only really use the egress side of it, perhaps some of our neighbors would enjoy affordable 10G internet access…

grahamburger 5y ago
(Author here) Maybe possible to figure out a way to use this. The problem is the people using it would still need transport to your network, which in practice can cost as much or nearly as much as direct DIA to their location. The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs? I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.
- toast0 5y ago
  The tricky bit is that a CDN doesn't really want geographic distribution so much as to be close to network distribution points. If a WISP's customers aren't enough to warrant a CDN node and their internet backhaul is fiber to a not particularly nearby internet exchange point, there's not a whole lot of benefit to the CDN to be at the WISP rather than the internet exchange. It might be different if the WISP has connections to local residential ISPs that aren't well connected to local internet exchanges (or there nearest internet exchange isn't very near) so the WISP facility offers a way to get (network) closer to more users. I could also see some potential for mixing traffic streams between a WISP (or several) and a CDN to try to balance traffic flows enough to qualify for peering with networks with restrictive peering policies; however, they also often have geographic requirements that might be harder to meet.
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    Thanks, this helps to confirm what I've always expected from my end (the wisp side.) It sure seems like a good match at a high level but seems to fall apart once we get in to the details of making it work.

amichal 5y ago

Having done this informally many years ago for a dozen neighbors in a village before we got decent broadband I can relate. People get real weird and twitching when there internet is out and there is nothing like being woken up at 6am on a Sunday with a "customer" in you bedroom ranting that the INTERNET IS DOWN. Or having to bust the kid who hid a wifi repeater in the village library to torrent gigabytes of "ISOs" over our tiny 1.5Mbit connection

bombcar 5y ago
People handle power failures more gracefully than they do internet outages.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  I moved to a new apartment and forgot to set up an account for electricity so my power was shut off for a day and a half. The most interesting thing was how it actually didn't bother me too much because I still had my phone with mobile data, if I didn't have any form of internet connection that would have been _much_ more of a hassle since I wouldn't have even been able to access the energy company website to resolve the issue.

runningskull 5y ago

Related and fun: the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange[1]. The person who started it has a great blog[2] about all kinds of related things. There’s a really good interview[3] with him about how it started and what it takes to run it on the On The Metal podcast (highly recommended in general) 1: https://fcix.net https://fcix.net 2: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com 3: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan

throwaway2037 5y ago
Your link #3 was an amazing listen! Thank you to share.

sfgweilr4f 5y ago

I think starlink is going to seriously mess with these kinds of businesses. Anyone with real knowledge care to chime in?

twiclo 5y ago
I work for a wisp as a software engineer. I'm knowledgeable enough about our network/prices. None of the network engineers believe the numbers spacex is claiming they can do yet they can see it right in front of their eyes. The main argument is, "Well once this network actually gets any load it'll crumble." Or, "The latency is going to be through the roof." But people who live where a WISP is their only option already don't care about latency all that much. I can't definitively say this is going to be disruptive but I can tell they're nervous. From my perspective the future of rural internet is in space.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  I work in networking but not for an ISP. I have worked in networking for a long time. To me, Starlink looks like a very typical Musk venture - vastly, vastly overhyped. As someone who would like to move to a more rural area, it appeals to me, but the numbers don't work. The _total planned switching capacity_ of the starlink constellation, and I emphasize planned because the current capacity is kind of a joke, is approximately that of a single current generation multi-linecard network switch. And that's assuming they do in-space switching, which at the moment they do not, and to my knowledge none of the current satellites are even capable of doing so in a non-experimental production capacity. They also have very significant routing challenges if they ever do that (and even if they don't). Worse, the skinny end of the pipe is on the wrong side of the satellites, so even things like caches are not really going to help them. It just isn't even remotely possible that Starlink is going to provide the current level of service once they get any kind of significant user uptake. The bandwidth per spot is too low and the spots are too large. I personally think that half the Starlink story (inter-satellite switching) is going to be SpaceX's "full self driving." Unlike FSD, SpaceX has an easy out - they will build out enough ground station coverage that they don't need to do inter-satellite switching except for the air/sea cases and those markets they may simply abandon. The true innovation of Starlink is that their ground stations are dirt cheap, but that's not a sexy story.

no_time 5y ago

It's a small miracle our local isp stayed afloat. Service was so flaky for a decade and a half that I could tell the weather outside by the lagspikes and speed drops. A few years ago he won some national/EU grant and now he operates a village wide fiber network. Probably the biggest infrastructure upgrade since the introduction of tapwater/sewage in the 70's.

icedchai 5y ago

I helped build a couple of ISPs in the 90's, back when upgrading from a 56K leased line to a T1 was considered a right of passage. Fun times. Not sure I'd want to go back. Seems hard to compete with the cable company in high density areas. Maybe a WISP if I was out in the boonies...

smoldesu 5y ago

My family bought internet from a small ISP nearby who had done the same thing. We paid ~$100/month for WISP access, with ~10% downtime, 500ms of latency (at lowest), and 500kb down. It was a nightmare, and my siblings performance in school started tanking as they couldn't access homework or lectures from home. We eventually switched to Starlink, which has been a 100x improvement, both literally and figuratively. Please, nobody ever start your own ISP. It absolutely sucks to use your infrastructure.

grahamburger 5y ago
Author of startyourownisp.com here. Your experience is unfortunate and definitely not unique, but also not universal or I would say even the norm for WISPs. I'm personally involved in running a few different ISPs in rural parts of the U.S. and Mexico. In all cases we are providing 100mbps+ service with <20ms latency to most of the Internet.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'll take your word for it, but I'm definitely not switching back from Starlink any time soon. We had more issues with our old provider in a week than we've had in 3 months of Starlink service.
  - snypher 5y ago
    I'm glad SpaceX didn't take your advice!

myfavoritedog 5y ago

Built an ISP back in the mid-90’s with some friends as a startup. Dial-up, ISDN, Frame Relay, DSL, etc. My one piece of advice is to not overestimate sales. We engineering types tend to underestimate how hard it can be to sell things. We love the “build it and they will come” fantasy. The real world rarely works that way, especially for something as run-of-the-mill these days as internet service.

nedrocks 5y ago

This is so interesting! I noticed a sign while driving yesterday that was unbranded saying "high speed internet" and an arbitrary local phone number. I presumed it could be a reseller but my mind started turning on how I could create an ISP and what that process looks like. Next morning I see this. I don't think I would execute on this personally because of the support required -- the spreadsheet takes into account the building but less so the maintaining. I would struggle to be hated as much as people fume at ISPs when their service is impacted.

Naac 5y ago

> How Much Do I need? > You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800 No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I don't think my community is better served by having yet another oversubscribed Comcast-like ISP ( even though its run by individuals )

bombcar 5y ago
Any ISP that charges less than Datacenter transit rates (something like $200/mo per gigabit) is oversubscribed. And even those rates at hurricane electric are oversubscribed simply because it doesn’t make sense to pay for unused transit.
- marcus0x62 5y ago
  All IP networks are oversubscribed, even the ones charging "datacenter transit rates". The difference, in this respect at least, is that good providers monitor utilization and proactively upgrade capacity.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It would be interesting for ISPs (especially municipal or small ones) to have a live graph showing ingress/outgress on their various routers and lines. There’s also “soft” limits (currently we pay for 10G on this fiber line that could do 1000G) vs hard limits (we are at 1G on this 1G copper connection).
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Over subscription makes complete sense because virtually no one maxes out their connection all the time so it makes sense to not reserve the maximum speed for every customer. My ISP lets you see a chart showing the nearest node's current usage and its capacity so you can see it just tap the top of the capacity each day at peak streaming hour and then spend most of the day almost unused.
  - tsjq 5y ago

seaorg 5y ago

Starlink doesn’t change anything, it’s not for dense coverage. Not too much overlap with WISP. Revolutionary in other ways though. The main problem with this way of transmitting is that you are on unregulated parts of the radio spectrum. So there’s nothing stopping someone from jamming your equipment, grinding everything to a halt, whether it’s on purpose or by accident. Maybe in practice it’s rare, but it’s too big a vulnerability for me to invest in such a business. I was wondering about laser modems. It could never be jammed without some kind of expensive and conspicuous physical intervention. I would feel much more comfortable investing in that even if lasers were more expensive or a pain in the ass. Not that it matters. 5G is going to put all these guys out of business.

grahamburger 5y ago
(Author here) > The main problem with this way of transmitting is that you are on unregulated parts of the radio spectrum. Traditionally this is true and is still mostly true today, but a ton of WISPs picked up PAL licenses in the CBRS band and are using that. Also, as you mentioned, in practice "jamming" equipment is uncommon (and very illegal!) Also I always recommend that folks use licensed or FCC registered links for their wireless backhaul, which limits the amount problems you'll get from interference. > I was wondering about laser modems. It could never be jammed without some kind of expensive and conspicuous physical intervention. I would feel much more comfortable investing in that even if lasers were more expensive or a pain in the ass. I've used some of these device (called "open air optical.") They're ok for very short range connections, but over anything more than a few hundred yards the performance of wireless is much better. > Not that it matters. 5G is going to put all these guys out of business. As a WISP you have the option of deploying 5G networks. It's expensive, but might be worth it. Many, many WISPs (myself included), operate fixed 4G LTE networks, and 5G is the next step. I haven't dabbled in 5G yet, but I have sales people calling me somewhat regularly ready to sell the gear. To the extent that 5G will live up to it's promises, WISPs are well positioned to take advantage of it.
- delabay 5y ago
  Just because you mentioned 5G CBRS: Freedomfi (https://freedomfi.com/ https://freedomfi.com/) is selling hardware later this year which will allow you to become your own cell tower for 5G CBRS bands, based on Facebook's magma project. You can backhaul a 5G modem/antenna, offload to a major MNO/MVNO, and get paid $.50 per gb consumption, paid in Helium HNT crypto (yes, crypto). Its still a big work in progress but could totally unlock private deployments of 5G networks and make them almost as easy as setting up wifi.

alksjdalkj 5y ago

It seems like there should be a lot of potential for something like this in cities. The site says that line of sight and apartment buildings are problems but in the east coast cities I'm familiar with there's lots of neighborhoods consisting mainly of row homes or 2-3 story multifamily houses. To me places like neighborhoods like those would be a natural fit, more so than suburbs. Also for me the main appeal of this is the potential for a not for profit, co-op style ISP. I.e. owned and operated by the customers. Although if the fiber is still coming from a Comcast or Verizon I'm not sure how different it would be vs. just buying consumer internet direct from Comcast/Verizon.

grahamburger 5y ago
Could be! East coast has traditionally been hard for WISPs because of trees. Recently I've been doing a proof of concept in Georgia, though, and had a lot of success even with tree cover. Would love to try out a few more of these places that have traditionally been hard for WISPs. (Author here.)
- kfajdsl 5y ago
  > Recently I've been doing a proof of concept in Georgia Can you disclose where in Georgia? I'm just curious as a resident of the state ;)
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    I can share these news articles! https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/06/start-your-own-isp-lowers-barrier-to-establishing-wireless-internet-service-providers/ https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2021/06/start-your-own-isp-lo... https://www.wfxg.com/story/43745096/georgia-cyber-center-works-to-bring-broadband-to-rural-parts-of-state https://www.wfxg.com/story/43745096/georgia-cyber-center-wor...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dimitrit 5y ago

I would love to see a guide on how to setup a 5G network

delabay 5y ago
This is now possible with the advent of CBRS. https://freedomfi.com/ https://freedomfi.com/ is selling hardware later this year which will allow you to become your own cell tower for 5G CBRS bands. You'll get paid $.50 per gb consumption, paid in Helium HNT crypto (yes, crypto). Its still a big work in progress but could totally unlock private deployments of 5G networks and make them almost as easy as setting up wifi.

mikewarot 5y ago

I thought this was going to be a game reliving my experience as the System Administrator at our local dialup internet service back in the 1990s. I wasn't there at the start, but I ran the thing for 2 years, serving about 200 customers. I wrote the "Internet Installation" floppy disks that people used to install networking on Windows 3.1, and configured dialup icons on their desktop. I was the ONLY technical support they had. I learned that people don't use the same words we technical folks do, so if you get a support call and ask "Have you installed anything?" the answer they give is no, but, if you ask "do you have any new programs or stuff", the answer will be yes. Why? - My theory is that they either didn't know what "installing" was (nobody opened up the computer to put something in), or they themselves didn't do it. You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway. If you're going to be an ISP, you're going to be on call 24/7/365, and you're going to see weird shit. More than once we had to deal with people wanting to post adult content for money.... and this was back in the days of dialup. Who knows what the heck the folks are doing today.

grahamburger 5y ago
(Author here) This is great, you can't see me but I'm laughing with you! :) I have sometimes considered making this in to a game, actually. It could have some fun territory and financial mechanics. But the more I think about it the more it seems like work, and the less I want to play it! To be realistic it would have to wake you up at 3AM and make you pull pants on and drive out to the bottom of a tower in a muddy field that smells like chicken shit to drop in a generator. While it's <0 F˚ outside.
- nexuist 5y ago
  I work in electricity brokering. Can relate to having to install networking infrastructure in below zero weather :)
quercusa 5y ago
This is a great point: > You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway. Back in the day, I would get called in to support a SCSI-connected external device. If you asked "Is the cable connected?" the answer was always "Yes", and sometimes "Do you think I'm a moron? Of course it's connected!". So we started asking them reach around the back of the device and unplug the cable, wait 10s, then plug it in again. This was usually followed by a sound of surprise as they realized that, wotta ya know, the cable wasn't connected.

godman_8 5y ago

I honestly feel like starting a WISP is risky right now. Companies like Starlink and T-Mobile have the money and infrastructure to compete and solve a lot of problems that WISPs have.

zekica 5y ago

has anyone thought about bufferbloat in wisp setting? my experience is that some manufacturers are way better than others and there is no way to compare them based on any specs. OpenWRT is the gold standard for fighting bufferbloat, but not many manufacturers even consider using algorithms and driver patches that can help... For example, Ubiquity still uses ancient 2.6 linux kernel with some backported funcionality while mikrotik has the same base but don't even try.

dboreham 5y ago
A WISP would set up interface queues properly.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  some would, but most only start to bother with queueing once they have a problem and that usually is too late from a customer perspective.

29athrowaway 5y ago

If you want to start your own ISP, lawyer up.

dboreham 5y ago
How so? (Ran a small ISP for a decade, never dealt with a legal issue).

traceroute66 5y ago

Start Your Own ISP ? To be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind was "good luck getting an IPv4 range in 2021". ;-) The second thought was. Don't bother unless you've got a clear competitive differentiator. There are already too many ISPs out there as it is without another "me too" cluttering up the market.

avipars 5y ago
the only place that would make sense would be someplace deserted or underserved... But spacex is rolling out their solution
SilverRed 5y ago
Most new ISPs now just use CG-NAT and put a thousand customers on a single IP.
tsjq 5y ago
genuinely curious: isn't the real world not yet ready for pure IPv6 ?
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > isn't the real world not yet ready for pure IPv6 ? Unfortunatley not. I can name a number of mid-to-large sized ISPs in major "western" countries who are still not able to give their customers IPv6, and the worst offenders haven't even finished deploying IPv6 on their core networks ! Fortunatley that number is diminishing as the months and years go by, but for now we are still in a world where you're going to struggle setting up a new ISP if you don't have any IPv4.

avipars 5y ago

Wouldn't SpaceX's solution essentially solve this... You just need to sign up and point the device they gave you to a satellite

mahathu 5y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments) Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments) There have been other threads on this general theme but I don't remember what they were; anyone?

LukeShu 5y ago
Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband–so he built his own fiber ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753360 - Jan 2021 (7 comments) 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978544 - May 2018 (230 comments) I was sure there was a thread about Mauch that got more traction, but I can't seem to find it.

netman21 5y ago

Nice. I started an ISP in 1993. I was not a network engineer. I was an automotive engineer. It was the most intense learning curve I have ever been on. Back then you could find lots of people willing to help out who knew everything about networking. I went on later to dabble in ecommerce by publishing the ISP Business Plan. A word template and spreadsheet to get you started. Dozens of ISPs around the world used it when they started up. This site feels like the extension of that. Still a good business to get into if you don't mind being stressed by the weather. :-)

matttproud 5y ago

Please remove my memories of an acquintance who lived and slept in a warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis (before that part of town gentrified) running Intuitive Networking Solutions (INGS) during the mid- to late-1990s: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025915/http://www.ings.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025915/http://www.ings.c... I wonder what happened to the the guy (searches Google for the then-proprietor Mimbach). :closes laptop and throws it out window:

parsecs 5y ago
I'm curious, do you happen to have any stories and stuff to tell about him? (Hope you live on the first floor so you can still use the defenestrated laptop)