My company Althea (https://althea.net) is making open source router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward.
This ends the incumbency problem by making bandwidth a commodity. Want a byte, buy a byte, switching to the best provider automatically. No software knowledge required, fully plug and play. (equipment still required, can't break the laws of RF. it's just regular WISP gear though)
Here's a talk I gave on exactly how the system is designed and implemented.
Huh, how do you deal with the problem of law enforcement assuming that an IP is a single subscriber? Even if law enforcement believed it up front, it still is a hassle to the users now dealing with law enforcement requests.
Start your own ISP in US - there, I fixed the title for you.
I would love to start my own ISP in my country, except that dealing with my corrupt government and corrupt bureaucracy existing here would mean I would have to have triple the cash of official investment, because here without "greasing the wheels" nothing works, and all of that is done by discretely leaving an envelope with cash on the corner of the discussion table that nobody in your presence will touch it. Also the amount of cash itself is a mind game on its own. You must discreetly research the person to see how much money they take as bribe. Too much and news about you being a newbie will spread like wild fire and all your future discussions will drain you of even more cash in discreet envelopes. Too little money and your request will get denied making you face the same person handing over another discreet envelope, and you better have at least the correct sum in there. So waste time asking for this mind game, waste cash that you'll never be able to officially report as deductible and then start implementing the points in article. Welcome to Romania ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Romania has 14.3M (1) Internet users for an active population of 9.2M (2)
As the same time, about 98% of the population has mobile phone coverage (which implies some form of data access) with terminals that can be had for 0 upfront cost and ~10€ per month subscription with very large traffic allowance.
Telekom (previous Romtelecom) can offer DSL services in most villages where a phone exchange is present.
Corruption or not, its probably a bad idea to start a wireless Internet provider in Romania because it already has excellent commodity connectivity virtually everywhere.
Ironic, because this kind of neighborhood ISP scheme was how Romania got a good foothold on internet connectivity in the 1990s, according to my Romanian friends who remember the period.
Weird, I'd imagine the ubiquitous and insanely cheap pole fiber would be a much bigger problem for WISPs in Romania than the corruption.
Seems like it would be very hard to make a profit unless you can find hundreds of customers close to each other who are willing to pay unusually high prices for internet connectivity.
I see this post come around every once in a while, and while the idea seems alluring, the fact is if you’re not in the right location and market, this kind of business will be unsustainable.
Maybe you can start your own ISP, but do not assume it will be in the same place you live. Analyze the country and find the pockets where you can thrive and grow a successful business, otherwise don’t even bother. Also bring a decent amount of cash and a good credit line.
* People found an ISP $NEWCOMER in an area where $ESTABLISHED has bad service and high fees.
* The newcomer invests loads of money into cabling the neighbourhood with fiber (or wireless internet) and offers deals with lower fees and better connectivity than $ESTABLISHED
* In a static world everyone would switch to $NEWCOMER and they'd make a lot of money, being able to expand to other places. But executives at $ESTABLISHED aren't stupid. They invest as well and lower their prices, too, just enough to be lower than $NEWCOMER.
* $ESTABLISHED waits until $NEWCOMER runs out of money. They rise prices again. It doesn't even matter if its price reductions mean $ESTABLISHED loses money in that region. The regions where there is no newcomer bring in enough cash to pay for the few regions with (temporary) losses.
Of course even if $NEWCOMER runs out of money, someone will buy their infrastructure and offer similar services, but there are more components in the competitive moats of established ISPs like (local) government granted monopolies in exchange for providing public buildings like school with free internet, or the bundling of streaming services with internet deals. Those moats usually are wide enough that there is no avail for small ISPs to break through. That being said, if you break through the moat, it's an insanely profitable business. DTAG had to invest tons of money until they got there and now they are in the place where the big ISPs can't harm them any more and the american daughter company is now the favourite of the DTAG shareholders.
I think there will be more demand once people realize there are other options. I saw a post on HN a few days about someone starting a small ISP in NYC. I suppose NYC market is saturated as it can get.
One interesting I ran across is how mountainous villages in Nepal has their Internet connections. I was in Annapurna trail last month, and in Manang village (which has about 20 guest houses), there is one big satellite connection and everyone shares from it. The owner charges the consumers a flat fee. From what I hear, and it could be exaggerated, they pay about $500 per year. I think a remote location, one uplink satellite, and a few wired subscribers can be a viable business!
Also since these would be WISPs (Wireless ISPs), it depends on topology as well (signals can't go through mountains, backhauls need to have line of sight to multiple customers, etc). It's a tricky balance of multiple variables.
Thank you, this is fantastic. I am working with a 100+ employee company doing highly technical engineering work in a very rural location, currently trying to run their business off of 10 MBPS. They are getting quotes exceeding $500k from most people they talk to just get any additional bandwidth to them (presumable fixed line fiber), which has resulted in this critical upgrade being put off for quite some time. This guide makes me think they could quite possibly build out their own backhaul system to a neighboring town for substantially less money. Should make my next conversation very interesting.
it’s probably not wise to build your own backhaul if you’re not in that business. don’t know the particulars of course but most likely DIY is not the way to go.
startyourownisp is not really about that.
now if you can do a microwave or other backhaul that’s great but it still sounds like something you should be able to get someone to provide for you.
I've helped many rural locations get online. If you want to email me your address, I can see if there are more reasonable options available to you than $500k.
How about building software for local mesh and municipal broadband networks instead? Why does software these days have to reside on servers 1000 miles away? Not only is this slower, but also more wasteful of energy.
To the downvoters: can you actually respond and explain why you are downvoting this sentiment?
It is interesting how phrase 'community-run ISP' is interpreted in different ways. I would understand it to mean ISP run by independent non-profit organization or consumer co-op, but definitely not ISP run by government/municipal organization. But many posts in this thread (and also in other discussions) use it for municipal ISP.
One of my first jobs while I was still in uni was working for a small ISP. It was really fun, we had many base stations and mostly provided wireless connectivity. However it's all okay when it's summer to go and deploy/fix antennas but when it was -20C outside and you have to climb on the roof and fix cables or mount a new antenna.. Well, at that point I understood that I need to change jobs :)
These are very dense talks with tons of information you'll probably not need unless you're reeeally going to do it, but it's good to watch for an overview of all steps involved anyway even if you don't.
The talks are from Altheapalooza from https://althea.net/, but they can be applied to non-Althea ISPs also (although you should consider Althea as it's great despite the shitcoinery).
>Right now even with a very tech-forward customer base 500 customers will only rarely spike above 900 Mbps (0.9Gbps). That means that even at peak times a customer could still come on and run a speed test and get 100Mbps.
A problem I had years ago was, I was living in an apartment that didn't even have a phone line. So I used 3G (4G was there but just not working at all) because the house Wifi was useless, in fact in the whole area this was a problem. So I started getting interested in using public Wifi (Freifunk) with a big antenna as upstream, and also provide it for the house eventually. But since then I realized that even on a normal Linux computer, configuring/routing multiple Wifi interfaces is absolutely non-trivial.
Eventually I gave up, but I bet Mesh Wifi are seriously becoming a thing in dense cities. Also some off-the-shelve routers allow 4G-USB-sticks as backup options. Fully automatizing this would be so awesome!
Where are the numbers on revenue here or what point of scale shows profit. They show a spreadsheet with 10 users costing $2,800/mo to maintain and $24k upfront. How could that ever be profitable at a competitive price point?
I just want someone on the inside at comcast so I can figure out how to get their gigabit pro package, they say I'm like 200ft too far from this magical node.
The problem with this is that consumer Internet access is priced based on the assumption that it will be "bursty". Heavy users are subsidized by light users, both on a moment-to-moment basis and overall.
Reselling consumer-level Internet access to means you're taking away the users that would otherwise be subsidizing your service (because they're buying from you instead) while still expecting the local ISP to shoulder a large share of the costs for bringing your packets to their final destinations.
That issue goes away if you pay for a dedicated line (IE, explicitly contracted reserved bandwidth) to an IXP or place somewhere will sell you bulk transit, and you're paying for that too. That's fine. The problem is with expecting to make a profit by being the ISP to your whole block, based on a $100/mo GBPS fiber drop.
Not to say that the ISP mono/duopolists aren't loathesome--excessive market power is the root of... not all, but lots of socio-economic evil. The economics of telecommunications is complicated.
This is from a broadband provider perspective but this company vetro is enabling people to do lay smart fiber. This could help someone lay do a fiber plan for their local municipality
https://www.vetrofibermap.com
[+] [-] jkilpatr|6 years ago|reply
This ends the incumbency problem by making bandwidth a commodity. Want a byte, buy a byte, switching to the best provider automatically. No software knowledge required, fully plug and play. (equipment still required, can't break the laws of RF. it's just regular WISP gear though)
Here's a talk I gave on exactly how the system is designed and implemented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1izRgUr-Tm-ixnqpd7NGW...
[+] [-] Operyl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unnouinceput|6 years ago|reply
I would love to start my own ISP in my country, except that dealing with my corrupt government and corrupt bureaucracy existing here would mean I would have to have triple the cash of official investment, because here without "greasing the wheels" nothing works, and all of that is done by discretely leaving an envelope with cash on the corner of the discussion table that nobody in your presence will touch it. Also the amount of cash itself is a mind game on its own. You must discreetly research the person to see how much money they take as bribe. Too much and news about you being a newbie will spread like wild fire and all your future discussions will drain you of even more cash in discreet envelopes. Too little money and your request will get denied making you face the same person handing over another discreet envelope, and you better have at least the correct sum in there. So waste time asking for this mind game, waste cash that you'll never be able to officially report as deductible and then start implementing the points in article. Welcome to Romania ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[+] [-] timurlenk|6 years ago|reply
As the same time, about 98% of the population has mobile phone coverage (which implies some form of data access) with terminals that can be had for 0 upfront cost and ~10€ per month subscription with very large traffic allowance. Telekom (previous Romtelecom) can offer DSL services in most villages where a phone exchange is present.
Corruption or not, its probably a bad idea to start a wireless Internet provider in Romania because it already has excellent commodity connectivity virtually everywhere.
1. https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm 2. https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-active-population-do...
[+] [-] allana|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hard_Space|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FDSGSG|6 years ago|reply
Seems like it would be very hard to make a profit unless you can find hundreds of customers close to each other who are willing to pay unusually high prices for internet connectivity.
[+] [-] grahamburger|6 years ago|reply
I'm not at a computer tonight I'll run through later today or tomorrow and answer questions. My contact info is on the website as well.
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|6 years ago|reply
Maybe you can start your own ISP, but do not assume it will be in the same place you live. Analyze the country and find the pockets where you can thrive and grow a successful business, otherwise don’t even bother. Also bring a decent amount of cash and a good credit line.
[+] [-] est31|6 years ago|reply
* People found an ISP $NEWCOMER in an area where $ESTABLISHED has bad service and high fees.
* The newcomer invests loads of money into cabling the neighbourhood with fiber (or wireless internet) and offers deals with lower fees and better connectivity than $ESTABLISHED
* In a static world everyone would switch to $NEWCOMER and they'd make a lot of money, being able to expand to other places. But executives at $ESTABLISHED aren't stupid. They invest as well and lower their prices, too, just enough to be lower than $NEWCOMER.
* $ESTABLISHED waits until $NEWCOMER runs out of money. They rise prices again. It doesn't even matter if its price reductions mean $ESTABLISHED loses money in that region. The regions where there is no newcomer bring in enough cash to pay for the few regions with (temporary) losses.
Of course even if $NEWCOMER runs out of money, someone will buy their infrastructure and offer similar services, but there are more components in the competitive moats of established ISPs like (local) government granted monopolies in exchange for providing public buildings like school with free internet, or the bundling of streaming services with internet deals. Those moats usually are wide enough that there is no avail for small ISPs to break through. That being said, if you break through the moat, it's an insanely profitable business. DTAG had to invest tons of money until they got there and now they are in the place where the big ISPs can't harm them any more and the american daughter company is now the favourite of the DTAG shareholders.
[+] [-] Ayesh|6 years ago|reply
One interesting I ran across is how mountainous villages in Nepal has their Internet connections. I was in Annapurna trail last month, and in Manang village (which has about 20 guest houses), there is one big satellite connection and everyone shares from it. The owner charges the consumers a flat fee. From what I hear, and it could be exaggerated, they pay about $500 per year. I think a remote location, one uplink satellite, and a few wired subscribers can be a viable business!
[+] [-] madamelic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techslave|6 years ago|reply
startyourownisp is not really about that.
now if you can do a microwave or other backhaul that’s great but it still sounds like something you should be able to get someone to provide for you.
[+] [-] iptrans|6 years ago|reply
Email in profile.
[+] [-] mciancia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eximius|6 years ago|reply
If only regulatory capture wasn't a thing...
[+] [-] iptrans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|6 years ago|reply
To the downvoters: can you actually respond and explain why you are downvoting this sentiment?
[+] [-] xvector|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] war1025|6 years ago|reply
https://osage.net/internet-services/
http://centraliowabroadband.org/
[+] [-] dbmueller|6 years ago|reply
https://ffdn.org/fr/membres
[+] [-] q3k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|6 years ago|reply
See others at https://althea.net/
[+] [-] zajio1am|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patneedham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMarius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deforciant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|6 years ago|reply
These are very dense talks with tons of information you'll probably not need unless you're reeeally going to do it, but it's good to watch for an overview of all steps involved anyway even if you don't.
The talks are from Altheapalooza from https://althea.net/, but they can be applied to non-Althea ISPs also (although you should consider Althea as it's great despite the shitcoinery).
[+] [-] emptysongglass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdz|6 years ago|reply
Is this still true?
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blablabla123|6 years ago|reply
Eventually I gave up, but I bet Mesh Wifi are seriously becoming a thing in dense cities. Also some off-the-shelve routers allow 4G-USB-sticks as backup options. Fully automatizing this would be so awesome!
[+] [-] advertising|6 years ago|reply
Am I missing a link here or something?
[+] [-] Rerarom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcomet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r_singh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyclobe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techntoke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liara_k|6 years ago|reply
Reselling consumer-level Internet access to means you're taking away the users that would otherwise be subsidizing your service (because they're buying from you instead) while still expecting the local ISP to shoulder a large share of the costs for bringing your packets to their final destinations.
That issue goes away if you pay for a dedicated line (IE, explicitly contracted reserved bandwidth) to an IXP or place somewhere will sell you bulk transit, and you're paying for that too. That's fine. The problem is with expecting to make a profit by being the ISP to your whole block, based on a $100/mo GBPS fiber drop.
Not to say that the ISP mono/duopolists aren't loathesome--excessive market power is the root of... not all, but lots of socio-economic evil. The economics of telecommunications is complicated.
[+] [-] dboreham|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptysongglass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morphle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanzheng|6 years ago|reply