I know how solar works, the cost of batteries, the decentralization of ISP infrasructure, the alternatives to batteries, and the availability of the roof (as opposed to buying extra land like you say). Ganted it can only hold so many panels and networking hardware does require a lot of electricity, but I am considering foregoing the use of batteries altogether. Solar panels are relatively efficient these days and cheap per watt compared to my local rates.
There was a thread on reddit about someone who became an ISP for their neighborhood.
It was an AMA IIRC.
That thread might prove useful.
Yeah, I appreciate it, but it feels like some people are only talking down to me without actually offering any substantial advice or information. Most people, however, are helping a lot. Those I am truly grateful for their criticisms and advice. If I wanted to be told how naive I was, I wouldn’t be doing my due dilligence right now to find information from people who are more experienced and knowledgeable than me. If I wanted people to tell me that I am missing a lot of knowledge (i.e a 4 Terabit line for the uplink is a statement of pure abstraction but I will refrain from explaining why); I would go ahead and start the ISP and then desperately try to fill in the gaps in my knowledge before I ran it into the ground.
There are a lot of nerds here and when they speak frankly it comes off as dismissive. Sometimes it’s about asking the right questions.
IMO we should take it from the top. After hearing what some people have said how have your plans changed to assimilate the newly garnered insight?
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The best way to get the internet to answer your question, is to post the wrong answer. - AvE
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Apologies if I come off as condescending - I really hate most large ISP organizations.
I noticed you mention BGP … have a look at some CCNA and CCNP study materials (they’re easy to find floating online in this day and age).
… and add MPLS to the study list - (spoiler, you might not need $100k router chassis for a small fiber ISP or a small wisp).
… also folks are mentioning 4terabit uplinks, usually these multi terabit links are used to connect data center fabrics together - they’re not used for just regular peering at a single exchange (although it may have changed recently, transceivers are dirt cheap these days). Residential internet access tends to skew heavily towards downstream capacity, and usually you can figure out how to peer with various content providers for free at an exchange and/or get them to install some cache servers in your “facility(ies)” to reduce the downlink network usage. Once you have facilities it might be worth considering.
Oversubscription is a real thing. Usually what folks sell as “Gigabit fiber” is this gpon thing where they slice 2.5Gbps across 32 customers - it’s “good enough” for most people to yearn for, and still call it gigabit even though isp only practically has provisioned a guaranteed 75Mbps per customer. (upstream is 1.25Gbps split for everyone).
I don’t know what passes as wisp bandwidth per customer these days, I’m guessing anything that’s guaranteed to play 2-3 netflix streams (roughly 50-100 mbps) is probably fine?
What do they do for the equivalent gigabit business line?
Afaik, small businesses accounts are usually the same as residential.
Extra couple of bucks per month gets you proper dual stack (in case ds-lite is default for that ISP) and you get to jump the queue if you need support and/or get 24x7 phone number (fake benefit since you only mostly care about your ISP outages during daytime). Some ISPs will disable some filtering by default and might give your traffic priority in case of congestion (very rare event so qos doesn’t matter). It also opens the door to pay a few bucks extra again, and get multiple ipv4 or a /48 . In some cases you don’t get bandwidth caps.
“medium business” accounts usually involve subcontractng someone to trench/install a dedicated fiber from your/customer place to wherever the isp has a cabinet. Places like office buildings or large hotels and similar tend to do this. They upsell internet access speeds, as well as if you have multiple buildings connected to them, you can ask them for VPN access and they’ll sell various phone services, business like TV licenses and so on.
Next level up is just a small leap in cost, but a large leap in hassle, where you hire people who do trenching to get you to a nearby IX, or multiple ISPs, and then you reach out and ask if folks would like to peer with you and what’s their peering policy. Sometimes it’s negotiable, sometimes it’s not. And you get to “buy transit” from various internet providers for everything you’ve not connected to directly. Assumption is you’ll have 40G or 100G gear on your end, and would be paying some tiny fee per port to the IX. Once you get a few ports, and you’re likely already peering with google and Facebook and Netflix and not paying transit for them directly, you can start thinking about getting a rack of hard drives delivered from them
Honestly the only benefit to me would be a static IP for my stuff and priority support.
I am permanent WFH so if the internet goes out I can’t do my job.
Thanks for the breakdown!
Very much OT, so i won’t go into detail, but me and my SO also WFH these days - I can highly recommend using openwrt with mwan3 and a cheap usb lte stick as a backup… we were offline on our main isp at least 3-4 times for most of the day over this last year and it wasn’t a hassle thanks to this setup.
Good luck with your endeavor.
The technical difficulties are just the tip of the iceberg, zoning laws are what keeps the monopolies of big ISPs, which is why Mesh Networks are gaining some traction in urban areas. You may have to deal with having to install fiber on a pole or underground and needing to wait for AT&T’s and whoever else’s technicians to supervise you when you install fiber in said location. And being the “nice guys” that they are, they will make you wait 2 months for installations until they send supervisors and the companies (if there are more of them) need to send supervisors at the same time and they will make sure one of them can’t come in the day that the other can.
Finish reading all the replies.
Some quick info: ASN (AS or Autonomous System Number) is a number, as the name implies, that identifies you, as an ISP, in the internet. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) requires ASN to make a peering connection with other Autonomous Systems (ISPs) and BGP will announce routes of the networks / subnets inside your network. This is the very basics, it’s a lot more complex than this.
Not to sound condescending, but you should get into CCNA 1 and CCNA 2 or the equivalent JNCIA (whichever is the cheaper). If you don’t want to be a technician, but just want to be a manager (which is absolutely fine), you don’t have to take the certification exams, just learn about it. CCNA 3 focuses more on the data center and WAN connections, it’s ok as well if you want more technical knowledge, but as TimHolus said, you should probably hire someone who has built networks before, if you manage to find someone enthusiastic about building an ISP from the ground-up with you, that would be great. But again, a lawyer is probably the most important person to look for. But having 1 expert from those 2 domains to co-found the company is what you should look for, after you assess your probability of success and are able to secure funds.
here is some info on someone who did it
I think I am definitely gonna start off small, then grow it to expand throughout my area. I will start it off in a rural part of my area. By this, I mean to say that I think that slow, but steady growth will be the key. Also, I intend on having my first peering connection to be through AT&T. However, AT&T is the only other ISP besides Comcast that exists in my local area. Do you think that, even though I am “partnering” directly with AT&T, they might impose some of the same anti-competitive measures that Comcast is sure to do?
Every dollar you take, is profit they won’t make! So, guess again… 
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You should understand that if they are your only peering partner, that:
- They know that every customer of yours is money they are not making. You are direct competitors.
- They also know that they can halt your entire operation by simply deciding to stop doing business with you.
I would recommend finding a second peering partner ASAP.
Yeah I already know that I need a second peering partner. I want to have three total peering partners. And yeah I figured that this would be the answer.
I just had an awesome shower idea. What I could do is create an IT company that offers managed “services” for local businesses. Then after that gets profitable enough, I could use it to float the ISP side of the business when its just starting out. Over time the ISP side could become profitable.
That’s a whole new can-o-worms you’re opening here. Managing other peoples IT comes down to “fixing someone else’s sh!t” as most likely they’ve either tried on their own or had the proverbial “friend of a cousin’s nephew” screw things up big time. And by stepping in, all of a sudden it’s your fault! And liability!
Having said that, it is a sensible path to gather capital for your ISP idea, as that’ll need well into 8 or 9 figures before you can pull that off on your own.
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Nah. I’d make it to where you have to use my datacenter if you want to use my services. I ain’t gonna stress about that kinda stupidity. What I intend on doing is marketing myself as a contractor. Basically, if you need computer infrastructure, I got you. Tell me what you want done and I’ll do it. Kinda like Linode, but for my local area only - though the emphasis will be placed on managed services rather than self-managed.