I’m fed up with large internet providers offering low speeds and high prices. They're monopolizing the market and their plans for data caps and other thievery is too much for me to handle anymore.
Therefore my plan or Idea that I first had was to create my own ISP and offer a cheap high speed service to others. After further investigation I found out how hard it would be to do that and how much money I didn't have to run such a plan. I also read of large ISP’s suing smaller companies just to get rid of them. My newest plan is still in the works and I don’t know if it’s possible so, I've decided to post it here to see if anyone can help me figure out if it can be done.
Basically I want to turn my house into an ISP, but I wouldn’t go through the the cities infrastructure to give others internet. My house would be the main base and I would give others internet wirelessly. The main signal would be at my house. I would then create a web of repeaters across the neighborhood sending out my signal as far as it could go. Now many people probably wouldn't use my service at first which would make it hard, because how would I have a web of repeaters without them being powered in peoples houses. But I don’t intend on using peoples houses to get my service started. I was hoping that since in my state it’s sunny most of the time, I could hook repeaters up to small solar panels and batteries. I could then spread these out and create my web. Eventually I could grow the web and cover an even larger area. The more that join would only help me grow even bigger.
Please, I would love feedback from people and any other ideas that might help me with this plan. Wouldn’t it be awesome if someday the internet could be in the hands of the people, not these nasty companies that don’t think of the future needs of society.
yes it can be done. but a better option is finding out if your area has dark fiber. if it dose you could buy a lease to it and offer service that way. if not then you could goto your town hall and establish a meeting to get approval to lay the cable first.
long range wireless networks are good in terms of bandwidth but have crappy latency and are bad at dealing with a large number of customers.
I believe that the fiber in my area is owned by Century Link or Comcast. I don't think that leaves me with any option of using fiber, so I would have to do something wirelessly. Do you know if there's any other way to do this without a cable?
I highly doubt they own the wire in most cases they should be leasing it from a company like Cogent. anyway this http://swiftfox.net/index.php/category/starting-a-wisp/
should help you if your really dead set on starting a wireless isp.
Your missing a fundamental key here. How are you going to connect your customers to the wider world? To escape the "shitty ISPs" you need to get around their network, how is someone else like Level3 for example going to connect to you? CenturyLink or Comcast (which ever is in your area) isn't going to provide bandwidth to someone who is competing with them in terms of "Last Mile ISP".
Plus is wireless really ideal as a backbone to provide the bandwidth that people desire these days. How is your network not going to interfere or be interfered with by other WiFi hotspots?
Where I live (Catalonia) there are some experiments in this direction.
First (2004) was Guifi. wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net official:
http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet
It's a peer 2 peer net under Wireless Commons License. Here you can see the net map. You can add a node no matter where you are. It works? Well, it's not really an ISP. It's mostly willful. It's for free but crappy bandwidth.
Then (early 2014) came Eticom Official
http://www.eticom.coop/
It's a cooperative where you pay € 100 to become partner (you own the company and you have a vote in the assemblies). Not yet providing service, but in a few months they will. It will provide ADSL and mobile contract. I'm not sure about fiber, but sure will provide VPN. Here you have the bylaws (G translate). I will be partner. I'll explain you when it works.
I know it will work 'cause Eticom is made with the same pattern than Som Energia. wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Som
Energia official: https://www.somenergia.coop/ca/ Som Energia is a coopeative who provides 100% green electricity at a fair price. I'm partner and right now we are around 17.600 partners :D
Dark fiber can be awesome. At HopeX this year they found dark fiber running thorough the building and managed to hookup 2GBs to the building. The building owner didn't even know it was there. One of those magical things. And this was only a small conference, imagine a neiborhood with long term plans, not just 2 days.
Dark fiber can be awesome. At HopeX this year they found dark fiber running thorough the building and managed to hookup 2GBs to the building. The building owner didn't even know it was there. One of those magical things. And this was only a small conference, imagine a neiborhood with long term plans, not just 2 days.
I would love love love someone savvy enough to do this in Australia, we are pretty much in the middle ages of internet still it's painful to hear everyone complaining about their ISP's :( Over here if you don't want a data cap you get a terrible connection and if you want a good connection you get a data cap. Both speeds suck but the first of the latter I can assure you, a youtube video will only play through seamlessly if on 240p, really pushing it at 480p.
I think network repeaters would be the way to go, I have seen that little vice doco and that just confirms that what you're suggesting is possible. If you could viably use like automated drones to continuously push this network over even further an area I think that would be pretty damn cool. Kinda like have one repeater employ it's circle of connectivity which communicates with 1 or 2 drones which stretch the diameter of this circle. As i said, probably not viable but still dam cool if it could be made to be.