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Start Your Own ISP
- spxneo 2y agotoo bad you can't do this in Canada
- Szpadel 2y agowhy?
- Nextgrid 2y agoRegulatory capture and the regulator being in bed with the incumbents. Not Canada-specific even, this is a common problem in a lot of countries when it comes to telecoms.
- betaby 2y agoOverregulation. Source, I work in telecom in Canada.
- loceng 2y agoAnd now all telecom companies are required to interconnect, right? Or did that not happen? The government mandated that after the "Rogers outage" - so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again."
- betaby 2y ago> And now all telecom companies are required to interconnect, right? No. That's not the case at all. > so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again." Also, no. Also what do you mean by interconnect? BGP IP peering is a thing for a while. Big folks peer with big folks.
- loceng 2y ago"Ottawa announces it will require telecoms to provide backup for each other during outages following Rogers system failure" - https://www.thestar.com/business/ottawa-announces-it-will-require-telecoms-to-provide-backup-for-each-other-during-outages-following/article_f0f743de-398d-5c80-9ffc-0821b242ad2f.html https://www.thestar.com/business/ottawa-announces-it-will-re... Are you aware of this?
- kazinator 2y agoWhen there is only "telecom" and not "telecoms", Ottawa will have to rephrase that.
- loceng 2y agoCanada will be abbreviated to CCP at that point.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoEven mainland china's ISPs are not entirely monolithic.
- loceng 2y agoAnd so this has to be done on a technical level in Canada to have the same capacity as the social oversight of CCP personnel being firmly embedded in each ISP on mainland China, right?
- protocolture 2y agoReally? I found Canada one of the least regulated. Although there were a few weird hoops. Out of ~10 countries I have supported WISP's in, I have never seen a country with less of a barrier to entry. We did have a theory that our customers were rural, and that the cities might present different issues. But trying to do what they did in Australia would be add 2 zeroes to the end of every cost.
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y agoAsk TekSavvy that question.
- betaby 2y agoOr Ebox. In fact some of hurdles were documented on dslreports forum. Starting with wholesale access to cable ( worked OK for a while ) continuing with wholesale access to fiber ( never happens ) and ending with the end of the 'sane' rates for cable ( final nail before Ebox, Destributel and other were sold to Bell/Telus/Cogeco )
- throw0101c 2y ago> continuing with wholesale access to fiber ( never happens ) * https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/11/06/bell-and-telus-must-offer-competitors-access-to-fibre-to-the-home-network-crtc/ https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/11/06/bell-and-telus-must-offer... Or you can do what Beanfield did and build out your own fibre infrastructure to customers.
- posguy 2y agoFighting every municipality and Homeowners Association (HOA, aka Strata) along the way. Running fiber is tough here in the US, even motivated incumbents see a minimum of a 6 month delay waiting for permits in many municipalities to run fiber through existing conduit owned by said incumbent.
- nayuki 2y agoBeanfield runs fiber through streets and sewers, and provides networking to office buildings and condominium apartments. I don't think they serve detached houses, as the low density is not worth it.
- throw0101c 2y agoOr Beanfield.
- anthk 2y agoNether in Spain...
- dotBen 2y agoNeither in San Francisco. In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH. It of course never happened.
- cdea 2y agoThere are a few in SF. MonkeyBrains being a local-friendly top of mind name. Downside is the smallest vibrations, wind gusts, or rain often leads to service degradation.
- mdaniel 2y agoAnd also Sonic.net crew representin', although bizarrely they are(were?) only north of Market street :-( I also had mostly-good experiences with Google Fiber (née Webpass) coming to the condo building, although despite their name it came in via WISP on the roof. I could have thrown a rock and hit the Webpass building from my condo but ... at least it wasn't Comcast and the whole building got gigabit IPv6 service for what any one of the owners would have paid for it from Comcast. I bet our units being pre-wired for Ethernet made the situation easier, but depending on the size of the HOA I'd guess not insurmountable even if one had to pull cat6 later
- protocolture 2y agoUh there are tons of small wisps in canada what are you smoking?
- getToTheChopin 2y agoThere are plenty of small ISPs operating in Canada. Many have been acquired by Bell / Telus / Rogers in recent years, but there are still dozens of players offering fixed wireless or fibre connections -- mostly in rural areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_service_providers_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_service_provi... https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectssearch/accelerated-high-speed-internet-program/ https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectss...
- nickthegreek 2y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539165 (June 17, 2021 — 607 points, 153 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 (August 17, 2019 — 635 points, 95 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 (January 16, 2018 — 938 points, 193 comments)
- candiodari 2y agoThere's an old joke however ... "How do you collect a small fortune with an ISP?" "Start with a large fortune"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scorpiontelly 2y agoI started one with a partner at age 21 and only a few thousand, but it can be a lot cheaper if you're not paying for a DIA
- bronco21016 2y agoI'm afraid you're actually referring to anything aviation related.
- scubbo 2y agoChiming in from the Magic: The Gathering fandom.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago<weeps in ham radio>
- grogenaut 2y agosips another glass at my winery, welp at least I've got wine
- renewiltord 2y agoMan, this was exciting back in the day, but now big risk you'll get blown out by Starlink. Starlink can just put high-speed internet into everyone's backyards.
- bityard 2y agoAt twice the price of cable and fiber, at least in my backyard...
- Alupis 2y agoAnd vastly slower speeds... Starlink is a replacement for dial-up, satellite, and in some cases legacy DSL- pretty much nothing else.
- freedomben 2y agoI think this is going to depend somewhat on how congested your area is, but Starlink is my home ISP and I sometimes get faster (download) speeds at home than I do at the office where we have fiber at 200 Mbps down. It has a little more variance but is consistently quite fast. If the backend is on GCP, it amazes me how fast it will go.
- stephen_g 2y agoWhy does your office only have fibre at 200Mbps down? Last office I was involved in setting up, we didn’t need symmetrical gigabit but the cost was fairly inconsequential compared to lower speeds, so we just went with the gigabit… Really strange that service providers even bother running fibre at lower speeds for commercial accounts…
- dboreham 2y agoThat's simply not true in my direct experience. I built a WISP back in the day, and although I don't have customers now, I still use the backhaul network to feed my office (typing this over that network). I have Starlink as a backup. Starlink is about as fast as my fixed wireless terrestrial link. It's often faster for download, and about 2/3 as fast for upload. Way, way faster than dialup and DSL.
- theideaofcoffee 2y agoI'm somewhat skeptical about the advice given out on this site, while it looks ok on first glance, can I really trust their "professional advice" if their corporate parent site [0] is serving up, as of this writing, an expired SSL cert? What other things might they be missing? [0] https://outpost.plus https://outpost.plus
- ShakataGaNai 2y agoCan you trust the advice of any random website? Can you trust the advice of someone here on Hacker News? Can I trust your commentary about their advice? The the answer largely depends on what you're trusting the advice for. Is it medical advice? Trust none of it. Is it the advice going to cost you a lot of money? I'd ask an expert. The site here is purely informational-use-at-your-own-risk. No different than anything else on the internet. It'll get you started on your research so you can have some basis upon which to ask/talk to each other. Hey, even links to a community discord where you can talk to like minded individuals and maybe get some more clarity.
- OJFord 2y agoEh in general sure. But if you're giving networking advice you definitely want to either opinionatedly not use TLS ('use case doesn't warrant it, so am against HTTPS all the things'), or have a valid cert.
- DanAtC 2y agoReal network engineers don't concern themselves with anything above layer 3.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- protocolture 2y agoI had a client who had quite a decent network, but was always having issues. Upon investigating and subsequently asking him how he designed his last mile, he pointed us at the facebook wisp operators group. He was servicing high value customers with large dedicated speeds, based on a network design that kind of works for servicing trailer parks in rural USA. Mostly because the loudest voices in the space come from the jankiest moron wisp operators. The issue is that a lot of the advice is bad, the good advice costs money and is indistinguishable for the lay person from the bad advice, and its very easy to access terrible advice. This website isn't terrible, but it would serve to pay for the best advice possible before spending even more money on the wrong hardware in the wrong area.
- throw0101c 2y agoAnyone interested in actually doing this may wish to look up Jared Mauch: * "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 * "NLNOG: Getting Fiber To My Town [video]": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 * "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 * "How To Create Your Own ISP with Jared Mauch": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJH9Emr99KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJH9Emr99KI
- rrix2 2y agoThat NLNOG talk is a great talk, thanks for resurfacing it!
- T3RMINATED 2y ago[dead]
- aliljet 2y agoWho wants to do this in Kirkland, WA?
- kazinator 2y agoDo people in Kirkland, WA get confused by product labels on Costco stuff?
- cgh 2y agoThe Kirkland brand, which is a Costco subsidiary, is actually named after the town. So I imagine not.
- toast0 2y agoDoes King County not have a municipal fiber provider? Kitsap does, but of course, WA law makes it hard for them to do roll outs. Everybody has to pay their own way, whereas commercial providers can do a roll out and wait for customers to return ROI later. You can cost share, if you can get your neighbors to also sign up... but there's only me and one other crazy person who will do it, because the cost is too high. Not a lot of people are interested in paying $50k to upgrade from 50-100M down to 100m or 1g symmetric. It's better, but not enough better; especially when T-mobile 5G can get you 500m+ down/ 200m+ up with no installation.
- dboreham 2y agoFun and all, but hard to make money with Starlink and 5G providers are ready to eat your lunch.
- j45 2y agoThere are still use cases and people who need something different than that. Besides that, not everyone is willing to pay for a Starlink priority plan.
- zachmu 2y agoI just switched from long-range wireless to Starlink basic. It's 50% cheaper and much, much more reliable. Speeds are comparable (when the long-range wifi wasn't down, which it was pretty often). Long-range wifi had a data cap with crazy overage fees, Starlink is unlimited.
- j45 2y agoStarlink basic is great. The priority service wasn’t much faster 6-8 months ago but seems to be much faster from what he been reading and seeing recently, but it might’ve relative to how busy a particular area is
- Alupis 2y agoI have yet to see a 5G home internet solution that's actually useful. It seems to be a "budget" internet option more than a viable alternative to most other solutions. Latency and speed are slow, and some of the providers mess with/block certain traffic (IKEv2 etc).
- kiwijamo 2y agoHere in New Zealand 4G has proved to work surprisely well for FWA (Fixed Wireless Access). I think the important thing is that the providers need to be very strict at limiting the number of customers they sell to. Here, the providers will proactively stop selling new FWA connection in a certain area the tower sector serving that area is getting close to capacity limits. They'll also check where the customer is located and ensure they can actually provide a decent service. This check is done automatically off coverage and capacity data. Most of the major FWA providers are mobile phone carriers, so both mobile and FWA customers actually use the same tower/spectrum/etc so the general increase in demand (especially from mobile given they can't stop selling new mobile servcies) sometimes results in a good service in Year 1 degrading to poorer service in subsquent years. However the carriers can easily resolve that by adding more 4G carriers, deploying 5G, and even building new cell sites (which kills two birds with one stone -- better coverage for mobile users and more capacity for FWA users). When FWA first came out I confess that I thought it was a silly idea until my eldery mother accepted an incentive from her provider (cheaper monthly fee) if she moved onto FWA (from ADSL previously). She's zero complaints. And sure enough it works well for a low-end user -- emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTube, etc all work just as good on FWA as it does on fibre/DSL/Cable/etc. She happens to be close enough to the tower and that tower has also been upgraded and has heaps of 4G carriers so the service is consisently good. YMMV but when done well, 4G/5G FWA is a great option for low-end users.
- bhhaskin 2y agoLots of people are mentioning starlink. But there is a hard cap to how many subscribers can be in a given zone. Which means that although it is cheap right now, there is a hard cap for supply. That's the main reason the marine and RV packages/plans cost more.
- woleium 2y agothat cap is based on the number of satellites, which is not fixed.
- giantg2 2y agoIt's fixed for a point in time. Launches of new satellites have considerable lead time.
- root_axis 2y agoAnd they only last for five years.
- protocolture 2y agoEh theres downlink capacity and then IP transit capacity from land sites too.
- toast0 2y agoCapacity at the teleports is probably pretty easy to upgrade. If possible they're near internet exchanges, and if not, they've most likely got good fiber connectivity and can update the optics on both sides to get more capacity easily. Maybe they've got some sites in the middle of nowhere, but I'd bet they worked with fiber vendors to pick places that were easy to hook up to existing fiber, because why not. I think I recall seeing someone had done some sleuthing and found that the teleports were sometimes being placed along rail right-of-ways, where there's often also fiber and maybe even power.
- 2y ago
- protocolture 2y agoA good wisp can be competitive vs starlink. The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik). Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested. A wisp operator can: 1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz. 2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO. 3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density 4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options. 5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt. What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.
- _huayra_ 2y ago> Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik Why this association? At least on the consumer side, I've really enjoyed using Mikrotik's stuff for my homelab. Is it just a sign of "someone not wanting to pony up for Real Networking Gear" or something similar?
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoI love Mikrotik but it kinda checks out. They're a high grade consumer/light commercial vendor more than utility scale commercial grade. I'd use them if I was trying to setup internet for my street or a small-medium sized office but not for my whole neighborhood. Their remote management utilities and software updates are good but not enough to keep me from having to ever get physical access to everything.
- donw 2y agoWho would you go with?
- pushedx 2y agoUnfortunately the cost of IPv4 space at auction alone is prohibitively expensive.
- cdea 2y agoThere are Federal programs you can apply for that will subsidize this cost. Otherwise, you're looking at roughly a 2~ year wait after being approved for the ARIN waitlist (max allocation size of /22 i think)
- cchance 2y agoThere’s tons of ipv6 only isps running dns64 and nat464 and other variations to limit ipv4 needs massively if at all
- eddieroger 2y agoI wish this hadn't been about a WISP, because I'd have loved to read about someone's experience bringing fibre to a door in a neighborhood. I live in a community with a regional ISP that offers me gigabit fibre with minimal extra hardware (just an ONT, hooray!), and with AT&T starting to dig in our area, I wondered what it would take to have a neighborhood only competitor. Probably infeasible, and a major disadvantage over a WISP in that I'd need to dig, but if the ground is already dug up and conduits being laid...
- mdaniel 2y ago> a major disadvantage over a WISP in that I'd need to dig, but if the ground is already dug up and conduits being laid... My life experience has been that there's a "sane person's mental model" and then there's Municipal Bureaucrazy and nere the twain shall meet So, yes, it's possible there is already trenching and it could even be that said conduit are owned by the taxpayer, but as far as random citizen pulling fibre through them ... I have fears. That story gets worse with the number of articles that I have read where Local Incumbent ISP bribes^Wlobbies a city councilperson to slow roll or straight-up deny any such request, making it doubly not a technology problem
- eddieroger 2y agoI wrote that with the best being optimism. I'm 100% sure these trenches, despite them being in our easements, is the property of AT&T for their exclusive use only. I can still wish that wasn't the case, but I'm not that naive.