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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 busin

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.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  I think it might be useful to have a section that includes anecdotal experiences of existing WISP's of what actions they had to take in their location to cover themselves, what legal challenges they ran into and any caveats or scenarios to be aware of. Obviously with the disclaimer that it is not legal advise and they should retain their own legal council. It might give folks a better picture of what to expect before they consider the investment. For what its worth, I really like the idea of people implementing some options for those that might only have access to one ISP. I was locked into Comcast for the longest time and would have loved to see more options available.
- p_l 5y ago
  Legal requirements can be funky. Back in ~2007 or so I considered doing my own WISP just to get any reliable internet that wasn't making 300 baud modem look nice (put enough latency on telnet and it will look like that). Turned out that if we wanted to cross a community (smallest administrative region in Poland), to be fully legal we might have had to submit war and disaster preparation plans to Ministry of Defense. For cooperation with military and other services, just in case.
adolph 5y ago
I am not an expert but I've seen this book recommended: Small Time Operator: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes, and Stay Out of Trouble https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Trouble/dp/1493040200 https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Trouble/...

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.

LinuxBender 5y ago
I think it might be useful to have a section that includes anecdotal experiences of existing WISP's of what actions they had to take in their location to cover themselves, what legal challenges they ran into and any caveats or scenarios to be aware of. Obviously with the disclaimer that it is not legal advise and they should retain their own legal council. It might give folks a better picture of what to expect before they consider the investment. For what its worth, I really like the idea of people implementing some options for those that might only have access to one ISP. I was locked into Comcast for the longest time and would have loved to see more options available.
p_l 5y ago
Legal requirements can be funky. Back in ~2007 or so I considered doing my own WISP just to get any reliable internet that wasn't making 300 baud modem look nice (put enough latency on telnet and it will look like that). Turned out that if we wanted to cross a community (smallest administrative region in Poland), to be fully legal we might have had to submit war and disaster preparation plans to Ministry of Defense. For cooperation with military and other services, just in case.

adolph 5y ago

I am not an expert but I've seen this book recommended: Small Time Operator: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes, and Stay Out of Trouble https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Trouble/dp/1493040200 https://www.amazon.com/Small-Time-Operator-Business-Trouble/...