I would caution against just jumping into this and trying to be a real ISP if your experience is in software development, sysadmin stuff, or something kind of tech industry adjacent but you've never worked for an ISP in a NOC environment, as a junior network engineer or similar for somebody else's medium to large sized ISP. There's a lot of missteps that can be made without experience.
In general I would recommend thinking of starting a small ISP as a depth and breadth of knowledge base you need to develop, similar to how an apprentice electrician is expected to work under some more senior/experienced persons in their field for a number of years before being able to operate independently.
I do not want to discourage anyone but I've seen a myriad of 'oh my god why did they do that' small WISPs with anywhere from 50 to 1500 customers. Going down the wrong network architecture/topology/business plan path can be very costly later on if you're 100% learning as you go.
Overall I think a site like this is a great idea, but the sheer scope of things that would need to be written down in a wiki-like format for everything to start your own ISP, and what systems/subsystems/technologies you will want to be familiar with, could fill thousands of pages if printed in book form. It's a gargantuan task to make a website that has everything needed to start an ISP from scratch, assuming the reader hasn't been involved in somebody else's ISP operations first.
Author here. I see your posts often and have a lot of respect for you as someone who obviously has a deeper knowledge of networking than I probably every will. That being said I don't really agree that a person necessarily needs a ton a networking or even any technical background to start a WISP, any more than they necessarily need a ton of experience as a cook to start a restaurant. They definitely need employees or advisors who have that experience, but like you allude to here probably no one can have all of the knowledge to so it themselves upfront.
Also I've also seen a lot of WISPs with a myriad of problems as they grow from a few dozen to a few hundred customers, many of them are able to make that transition, fix their problems, and either grow or be acquired. This seems basically the same as any industry - if everyone waited until they knew exactly what they're doing no one would start anything.
All of this said, starting a WISP isn't for everyone. I talk to a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting an ISP, and often my best, honest advice is that it's not a great idea in their situation.
What type of profit potential is there to doing this? Seems like good stable income, but I also see lots of downsides with literally not knowing how anything works (and not being an engineer). There would be an awful lot of new information to learn, so the profit potential would really need to be there.
I thought this was going to be a game reliving my experience as the System Administrator at our local dialup internet service back in the 1990s. I wasn't there at the start, but I ran the thing for 2 years, serving about 200 customers. I wrote the "Internet Installation" floppy disks that people used to install networking on Windows 3.1, and configured dialup icons on their desktop. I was the ONLY technical support they had.
I learned that people don't use the same words we technical folks do, so if you get a support call and ask "Have you installed anything?" the answer they give is no, but, if you ask "do you have any new programs or stuff", the answer will be yes.
Why? - My theory is that they either didn't know what "installing" was (nobody opened up the computer to put something in), or they themselves didn't do it.
You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway.
If you're going to be an ISP, you're going to be on call 24/7/365, and you're going to see weird shit. More than once we had to deal with people wanting to post adult content for money.... and this was back in the days of dialup. Who knows what the heck the folks are doing today.
> You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway.
Back in the day, I would get called in to support a SCSI-connected external device. If you asked "Is the cable connected?" the answer was always "Yes", and sometimes "Do you think I'm a moron? Of course it's connected!". So we started asking them reach around the back of the device and unplug the cable, wait 10s, then plug it in again. This was usually followed by a sound of surprise as they realized that, wotta ya know, the cable wasn't connected.
(Author here) This is great, you can't see me but I'm laughing with you! :)
I have sometimes considered making this in to a game, actually. It could have some fun territory and financial mechanics. But the more I think about it the more it seems like work, and the less I want to play it!
To be realistic it would have to wake you up at 3AM and make you pull pants on and drive out to the bottom of a tower in a muddy field that smells like chicken shit to drop in a generator. While it's <0 F˚ outside.
Hi folks, author of startyourownisp.com here. Not sure why we hit the front page today, but happy to be here! I'll try to hang around and answer questions for the next few hours. Thanks!
Thanks for the article! Well written I think. I agree with the top post that if you're a engineer who hasn't dealt with low level networking stuff, worked in a DC, or had to be on call, this probably isn't a good first project. But golly, I can't wait to have the free time and capital to try starting one. (I live in a spectrum dominated area) Maybe try and make the whole operation solar powered.
Also fun, for anyone else who's interested taking "DIY self hosting" to new extreme, it's possible to start your own cell phone company! I don't have a link handy, but search "starting an MVNO" will yield tons of links. When I did the math, it worked out to require only ~100 customers to hit break even. (assuming your time and labor is free, of course)
I have unreasonably happy giggle-fit inducing day dreams about some day using my own designed and manufactured smart phone (easy, because IDGAF about trendy features. running stock debian is fine.), which gets service from my own service provider, and my homemade laptop, getting internet from my own ISP, in my solar powered house.
Also also, for anyone who lives in the SFBA, monkeybrains internet is the best ISP evar. I was one of their first customers, and I miss my ~4ms ping times to the office, and ~8ms ping time to my colo box.
Every time I’ve seen your site posted here or on reddit you’re always in the comments offering to help and answering questions so I just wanted to say major kudos to you for being so helpful and responsive. I’m sure it can’t be easy but you’re doing a great public service by sharing your knowledge.
Is this a reasonable way to make some money? Or for people who are fed up with their ISP options and are ready to take matters into their own hands? Basically, who do you imagine the typical user of your guide is?
Having done this informally many years ago for a dozen neighbors in a village before we got decent broadband I can relate. People get real weird and twitching when there internet is out and there is nothing like being woken up at 6am on a Sunday with a "customer" in you bedroom ranting that the INTERNET IS DOWN. Or having to bust the kid who hid a wifi repeater in the village library to torrent gigabytes of "ISOs" over our tiny 1.5Mbit connection
My family bought internet from a small ISP nearby who had done the same thing. We paid ~$100/month for WISP access, with ~10% downtime, 500ms of latency (at lowest), and 500kb down. It was a nightmare, and my siblings performance in school started tanking as they couldn't access homework or lectures from home. We eventually switched to Starlink, which has been a 100x improvement, both literally and figuratively.
Please, nobody ever start your own ISP. It absolutely sucks to use your infrastructure.
Author of startyourownisp.com here. Your experience is unfortunate and definitely not unique, but also not universal or I would say even the norm for WISPs. I'm personally involved in running a few different ISPs in rural parts of the U.S. and Mexico. In all cases we are providing 100mbps+ service with <20ms latency to most of the Internet.
It's a small miracle our local isp stayed afloat. Service was so flaky for a decade and a half that I could tell the weather outside by the lagspikes and speed drops. A few years ago he won some national/EU grant and now he operates a village wide fiber network.
Probably the biggest infrastructure upgrade since the introduction of tapwater/sewage in the 70's.
Related and fun: the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange[1]. The person who started it has a great blog[2] about all kinds of related things. There’s a really good interview[3] with him about how it started and what it takes to run it on the On The Metal podcast (highly recommended in general)
Over the last year or so the company I run moved some content delivery workloads from a CDN onto our own network. So now we have something like 100Gbit/s of total external bandwidth.
The next thought in my addled brain is that since we only really use the egress side of it, perhaps some of our neighbors would enjoy affordable 10G internet access…
(Author here) Maybe possible to figure out a way to use this. The problem is the people using it would still need transport to your network, which in practice can cost as much or nearly as much as direct DIA to their location.
The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs?
I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.
> You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800
No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I don't think my community is better served by having yet another oversubscribed Comcast-like ISP ( even though its run by individuals )
I have 320 subscribers (on fibre) out of one of our PoPs, and the evening peak is around 1.6-1.8 Gbps these days. Oversubscribing 800 customers on a single 1 Gbps connection is going to result in an absolutely awful end user experience.
Most WISPs make the mistake of failing to monitor airtime on their access points. With much of the low cost gear on the market the performance of a sector is going to be limited by the performance of the customer with the worst SNR. Newer gear that implements MU-MIMO significantly improves that since the access point can transmit to multiple subscribers at the same time. Have a look at some of the Cambium equipment. Other vendors have taken to implementing better QoS on the wireless phy side of things, but without MU-MIMO, it's just shuffling chairs on the deck of the titanic while the whole network sinks to the level of the guy with a bunch of trees in the fresnel zone of their 5 GHZ antenna.
commercial isp's do oversubscribe in the range of 1k-20k. it'll work fine if there is some form of fair-queueing that limits interference between customers.
It seems like there should be a lot of potential for something like this in cities. The site says that line of sight and apartment buildings are problems but in the east coast cities I'm familiar with there's lots of neighborhoods consisting mainly of row homes or 2-3 story multifamily houses. To me places like neighborhoods like those would be a natural fit, more so than suburbs.
Also for me the main appeal of this is the potential for a not for profit, co-op style ISP. I.e. owned and operated by the customers. Although if the fiber is still coming from a Comcast or Verizon I'm not sure how different it would be vs. just buying consumer internet direct from Comcast/Verizon.
Could be! East coast has traditionally been hard for WISPs because of trees. Recently I've been doing a proof of concept in Georgia, though, and had a lot of success even with tree cover. Would love to try out a few more of these places that have traditionally been hard for WISPs. (Author here.)
Had a colleague that ran an a very small scale ISP. It was back in the day when the country is transitioning between dialup and broadband. Needless to say that it was very short lived.
Nice. I started an ISP in 1993. I was not a network engineer. I was an automotive engineer. It was the most intense learning curve I have ever been on. Back then you could find lots of people willing to help out who knew everything about networking. I went on later to dabble in ecommerce by publishing the ISP Business Plan. A word template and spreadsheet to get you started. Dozens of ISPs around the world used it when they started up. This site feels like the extension of that. Still a good business to get into if you don't mind being stressed by the weather. :-)
This is so interesting! I noticed a sign while driving yesterday that was unbranded saying "high speed internet" and an arbitrary local phone number. I presumed it could be a reseller but my mind started turning on how I could create an ISP and what that process looks like. Next morning I see this.
I don't think I would execute on this personally because of the support required -- the spreadsheet takes into account the building but less so the maintaining. I would struggle to be hated as much as people fume at ISPs when their service is impacted.
While this is something I would never take on for a handful of reasons, this is extremely cool in concept and this would be an incredibly fun project to put together.
To be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind was "good luck getting an IPv4 range in 2021". ;-)
The second thought was. Don't bother unless you've got a clear competitive differentiator. There are already too many ISPs out there as it is without another "me too" cluttering up the market.
I helped build a couple of ISPs in the 90's, back when upgrading from a 56K leased line to a T1 was considered a right of passage. Fun times. Not sure I'd want to go back. Seems hard to compete with the cable company in high density areas. Maybe a WISP if I was out in the boonies...
I honestly feel like starting a WISP is risky right now. Companies like Starlink and T-Mobile have the money and infrastructure to compete and solve a lot of problems that WISPs have.
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
In general I would recommend thinking of starting a small ISP as a depth and breadth of knowledge base you need to develop, similar to how an apprentice electrician is expected to work under some more senior/experienced persons in their field for a number of years before being able to operate independently.
I do not want to discourage anyone but I've seen a myriad of 'oh my god why did they do that' small WISPs with anywhere from 50 to 1500 customers. Going down the wrong network architecture/topology/business plan path can be very costly later on if you're 100% learning as you go.
Overall I think a site like this is a great idea, but the sheer scope of things that would need to be written down in a wiki-like format for everything to start your own ISP, and what systems/subsystems/technologies you will want to be familiar with, could fill thousands of pages if printed in book form. It's a gargantuan task to make a website that has everything needed to start an ISP from scratch, assuming the reader hasn't been involved in somebody else's ISP operations first.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
Also I've also seen a lot of WISPs with a myriad of problems as they grow from a few dozen to a few hundred customers, many of them are able to make that transition, fix their problems, and either grow or be acquired. This seems basically the same as any industry - if everyone waited until they knew exactly what they're doing no one would start anything.
All of this said, starting a WISP isn't for everyone. I talk to a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting an ISP, and often my best, honest advice is that it's not a great idea in their situation.
[+] [-] Exuma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|4 years ago|reply
I don't think that anyone needs caution warnings about starting an ISP... more then likely they know that it isn't like drinking a cup of coffee.
[+] [-] williesleg|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
I learned that people don't use the same words we technical folks do, so if you get a support call and ask "Have you installed anything?" the answer they give is no, but, if you ask "do you have any new programs or stuff", the answer will be yes.
Why? - My theory is that they either didn't know what "installing" was (nobody opened up the computer to put something in), or they themselves didn't do it.
You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway.
If you're going to be an ISP, you're going to be on call 24/7/365, and you're going to see weird shit. More than once we had to deal with people wanting to post adult content for money.... and this was back in the days of dialup. Who knows what the heck the folks are doing today.
[+] [-] quercusa|4 years ago|reply
> You have to have a very strong ability to route around the person on the other end of the phones preconceptions of the world and get the right answers anyway.
Back in the day, I would get called in to support a SCSI-connected external device. If you asked "Is the cable connected?" the answer was always "Yes", and sometimes "Do you think I'm a moron? Of course it's connected!". So we started asking them reach around the back of the device and unplug the cable, wait 10s, then plug it in again. This was usually followed by a sound of surprise as they realized that, wotta ya know, the cable wasn't connected.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
I have sometimes considered making this in to a game, actually. It could have some fun territory and financial mechanics. But the more I think about it the more it seems like work, and the less I want to play it!
To be realistic it would have to wake you up at 3AM and make you pull pants on and drive out to the bottom of a tower in a muddy field that smells like chicken shit to drop in a generator. While it's <0 F˚ outside.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loxias|4 years ago|reply
Also fun, for anyone else who's interested taking "DIY self hosting" to new extreme, it's possible to start your own cell phone company! I don't have a link handy, but search "starting an MVNO" will yield tons of links. When I did the math, it worked out to require only ~100 customers to hit break even. (assuming your time and labor is free, of course)
I have unreasonably happy giggle-fit inducing day dreams about some day using my own designed and manufactured smart phone (easy, because IDGAF about trendy features. running stock debian is fine.), which gets service from my own service provider, and my homemade laptop, getting internet from my own ISP, in my solar powered house.
Also also, for anyone who lives in the SFBA, monkeybrains internet is the best ISP evar. I was one of their first customers, and I miss my ~4ms ping times to the office, and ~8ms ping time to my colo box.
[+] [-] tomschlick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|4 years ago|reply
Also, is SYOISP closer to what https://starry.com/ has deployed?
Thanks.
[+] [-] burnished|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amichal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
Please, nobody ever start your own ISP. It absolutely sucks to use your infrastructure.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_time|4 years ago|reply
Probably the biggest infrastructure upgrade since the introduction of tapwater/sewage in the 70's.
[+] [-] runningskull|4 years ago|reply
1: https://fcix.net
2: https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com
3: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/kenneth-finnegan
[+] [-] throwaway2037|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markonen|4 years ago|reply
The next thought in my addled brain is that since we only really use the egress side of it, perhaps some of our neighbors would enjoy affordable 10G internet access…
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs?
I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.
[+] [-] Naac|4 years ago|reply
> You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800
No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I don't think my community is better served by having yet another oversubscribed Comcast-like ISP ( even though its run by individuals )
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
And even those rates at hurricane electric are oversubscribed simply because it doesn’t make sense to pay for unused transit.
[+] [-] bcrl|4 years ago|reply
Most WISPs make the mistake of failing to monitor airtime on their access points. With much of the low cost gear on the market the performance of a sector is going to be limited by the performance of the customer with the worst SNR. Newer gear that implements MU-MIMO significantly improves that since the access point can transmit to multiple subscribers at the same time. Have a look at some of the Cambium equipment. Other vendors have taken to implementing better QoS on the wireless phy side of things, but without MU-MIMO, it's just shuffling chairs on the deck of the titanic while the whole network sinks to the level of the guy with a bunch of trees in the fresnel zone of their 5 GHZ antenna.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
FWIW, though, Comcast's oversell rates are probably worse (at least in some places) than even the old number that I've listed here.
[+] [-] hansel_der|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alksjdalkj|4 years ago|reply
Also for me the main appeal of this is the potential for a not for profit, co-op style ISP. I.e. owned and operated by the customers. Although if the fiber is still coming from a Comcast or Verizon I'm not sure how different it would be vs. just buying consumer internet direct from Comcast/Verizon.
[+] [-] grahamburger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yitchelle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments)
Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments)
There have been other threads on this general theme but I don't remember what they were; anyone?
[+] [-] LukeShu|4 years ago|reply
'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978544 - May 2018 (230 comments)
I was sure there was a thread about Mauch that got more traction, but I can't seem to find it.
[+] [-] zekica|4 years ago|reply
my experience is that some manufacturers are way better than others and there is no way to compare them based on any specs.
OpenWRT is the gold standard for fighting bufferbloat, but not many manufacturers even consider using algorithms and driver patches that can help...
For example, Ubiquity still uses ancient 2.6 linux kernel with some backported funcionality while mikrotik has the same base but don't even try.
[+] [-] dboreham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netman21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nedrocks|4 years ago|reply
I don't think I would execute on this personally because of the support required -- the spreadsheet takes into account the building but less so the maintaining. I would struggle to be hated as much as people fume at ISPs when their service is impacted.
[+] [-] jjice|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traceroute66|4 years ago|reply
To be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind was "good luck getting an IPv4 range in 2021". ;-)
The second thought was. Don't bother unless you've got a clear competitive differentiator. There are already too many ISPs out there as it is without another "me too" cluttering up the market.
[+] [-] SilverRed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avipars|4 years ago|reply
But spacex is rolling out their solution
[+] [-] tsjq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevehawk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godman_8|4 years ago|reply