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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 t

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.

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.