Start Your Own ISP

https://startyourownisp.com/

by agomez314 • 2 years ago

385 103 2 years ago

startyourownisp.com

spxneo• 2 years ago

too bad you can't do this in Canada

Szpadel• 2 years ago

why?

betaby3• 2 years ago

Overregulation. Source, I work in telecom in Canada.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 years ago

Ask TekSavvy that question.

Nextgrid• 2 years ago

Regulatory 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.

anthk• 2 years ago

Nether in Spain...

dotBen• 2 years ago

Neither 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.

protocolture10• 2 years ago

Uh there are tons of small wisps in canada what are you smoking?

getToTheChopin• 2 years ago

There 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_provi...

https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectss...

nickthegreek• 2 years ago

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539165 (June 17, 2021 — 607 points, 153 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 (August 17, 2019 — 635 points, 95 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 (January 16, 2018 — 938 points, 193 comments)

candiodari• 2 years ago

There's an old joke however ...

"How do you collect a small fortune with an ISP?"

"Start with a large fortune"

scorpiontelly• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

I'm afraid you're actually referring to anything aviation related.

scubbo• 2 years ago

Chiming in from the Magic: The Gathering fandom.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Man, 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• 2 years ago

At twice the price of cable and fiber, at least in my backyard...

Alupis4• 2 years ago

And vastly slower speeds...

Starlink is a replacement for dial-up, satellite, and in some cases legacy DSL- pretty much nothing else.

butshouldyou• 2 years ago

Regional pricing means it's 500-560 USD up-front to buy the receiver. Then, 50-100 USD per month for the residential plan, which includes unlimited data.

That's not too bad. However, there's no speed listed. Third party reviews state 100/10 Mbps (up/down), which is not too bad considering the same site states a UK average of 75/15.

The vast majority of the UK has pretty slow speeds.

That said, unlimited internet subscriptions over fiber can be had for as little as 20 USD per month, which is far cheaper.

lh7777• 2 years ago

In my area, fiber and cable aren’t available. If you’re lucky, you can get 5 mbps DSL for $70+ per month.

The only credible options are WISP, Starlink, and cellular. WISP is the same price as Starlink and is slower / less reliable. Cellular is cheaper but gets slow at peak hours.

In short, the local WISP has been losing a lot of customers to Starlink and T-Mobile Home Internet.

quinncom• 2 years ago

Until Starlink can lower prices to < $10/month, community-level ISPs will still be relevant to many locations (LatAm, etc). Starlink uplinks might even be used by the ISPs.

I lived in a village in Colombia, population about 2000, which had four competing wireless ISPs. The quality was extremely low, but so were the prices.

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

Starlink can't currently compete with cable and fiber speeds, and it's a Musk business, so it'll probably collapse when his house of cards comes down.

TheRealPomax• 2 years ago

Hmm, not really. Starlink only offers 150mbit, at $150/mo, whereas the costs for starting your ISP as presented here is about $25k up front and $3k/mo to keep it running. That's ridiculous for one person, but entirely economically viable if you're literally starting your own local ISP to service a few hundred homes, driving down the one-time signup and monthly fees to something drastically lower than what Starlink charges, for speeds that are drastically higher than what Starlink offers.

But as any business venture: if you don't know whether you can get the customers, you better have the cash lying around to pay for everything yourself =D

komali2• 2 years ago

Don't Starlink satellites only last 5 years? I'm not sure it's a sustainable solution compared to towers and lain cable.

dotnet00• 2 years ago

Considering that they're still iterating on and launching satellites, it doesn't really matter that they'll only last 5 years. It isn't like they're launching the constellation and then sitting on it waiting for the satellites to fall out of the sky.

For now they're having to launch a Falcon 9 twice a week to build up the constellation, but with Starship intended to be able to launch the equivalent of several F9 launches in one go, maintaining the constellation will become much easier.

theideaofcoffee• 2 years ago

I'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

ShakataGaNai• 2 years ago

Can 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.

OJFord2• 2 years ago

Eh 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.

protocolture10• 2 years ago

I 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.

ikiris• 2 years ago

This is the most accurate description of wisp information handoff I've ever seen.

arccy• 2 years ago

the good advice costs money and is indistinguishable for the lay person from the bad advice

the lay person also may not be able to identify who's advice is worth paying for

throw0101c3• 2 years ago

Anyone 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

* "NLNOG: Getting Fiber To My Town [video]": 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

* "How To Create Your Own ISP with Jared Mauch": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJH9Emr99KI

rrix2• 2 years ago

That NLNOG talk is a great talk, thanks for resurfacing it!

aliljet• 2 years ago

Who wants to do this in Kirkland, WA?

kazinator2• 2 years ago

Do people in Kirkland, WA get confused by product labels on Costco stuff?

cgh• 2 years ago

The Kirkland brand, which is a Costco subsidiary, is actually named after the town. So I imagine not.

toast03• 2 years ago

Does 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.

dboreham2• 2 years ago

Fun and all, but hard to make money with Starlink and 5G providers are ready to eat your lunch.

j452• 2 years ago

There 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.

zachmu2• 2 years ago

I 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.

Alupis4• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Here 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.

OJFord2• 2 years ago

I'm writing from 4G, the same that I use to work remotely as a software engineer. It's not even a dedicated 'home internet' solution, just an unlimited data plan that I use with a decent modem/antenna.

(Yes obviously latency is worse than fibre, I would probably hate it if I was still into FPS gaming etc., but in practice it's fine.)

(When I set it up it was better and cheaper than the copper options, fibre not available. Fibre or Starlink would now probably be better, but still each much more expensive, even ignoring one-time costs. I don't need it/not worth it. Idk about latency but I could certainly get more bandwidth out of one-time costs on LTE too.)

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

Eh, my ISP (Comcast) has extremely unreliable internet across two different homes I've lived in, to the point that I absolutely rely on having both a 5G modem and a wired one. If my 5G signal was strong enough to keep me going on a rainy day, I would absolutely ditch the wired connection and its flaky mysterious dropped packets.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a wired connection. But if my isp can't even be bothered to give me a functional connection more than 90% of the time...

psnehanshu• 2 years ago

From India, and right now I have unlimited 5G data plan on my cellular that works pretty well. In someplaces it get's 4G also.

toast03• 2 years ago

I tried out (US) T-Mobile's small business internet, and while it wasn't useful for me, if I was a little more normal or had worked a little harder with sales to get what I needed, it would be fine. The v6 connectivity was pretty good, v4 is CGNAT, unless you sign up for a static IP, which needs an EIN business account; the sales rep can sign you up for a static IP with a SSN business account, but it will be deleted and they won't add it back.

Also, I forgot which equipment they gave me, but it had terrible buffer bloat, and did some nasty nasty arp spoofing when I placed it on my network and made everything bad, and it wouldn't let me put it on XX.2.0/24 and have a static route for XX.0.0/24 so maybe I could keep it roughly contained. Maaaaybe I could have done something with VLANs, but I was done at that point. I'm still grumpy because it took 3 months and contacting the CEO email address to get the bill settled, but they did settle it. Not exactly a risk free trial in my book.

Speed and latency was good though, as long as you didn't hit bufferbloat. I don't remember exactly, but 500M+ down, 200M+ up, < 25 ms ping; CGNAT brought the speeds down to about 100M, but most CDNs are v6 capable now, and most people aren't that bothered by CGNAT. Obviously you and I and a lot of others here have reasons to want their own v4 address, but a lot of people in a lot of places can't get one on any home internet, so. Of course, speed and latency vary a lot by your reception, but I live on a heavily forested and very hilly island; I am at a high point, but surrounded by trees so eh?

bradly• 2 years ago

I have 5G home internet in the US and haven't had issues. Fiber is at capacity on our side of the street and we don't have other options.

What service have you tried that didn't work well for you?

bhhaskin• 2 years ago

Lots 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• 2 years ago

that cap is based on the number of satellites, which is not fixed.

giantg2• 2 years ago

It's fixed for a point in time. Launches of new satellites have considerable lead time.

protocolture10• 2 years ago

Eh theres downlink capacity and then IP transit capacity from land sites too.

Gigachad• 2 years ago

Isn't the point of starlink to service extremely remote areas? If there are too many subscribers for the system to work, it sounds like it should be dense enough to have fiber run to houses.

protocolture10• 2 years ago

A 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_3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I 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.

protocolture10• 2 years ago

Weird I thought I answered this.

Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night.

ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6.

MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table.

Theres other issues too. I could really go all day.

Great homelab stuff. I use it too.

RajT882• 2 years ago

I worked at such a place from 2003 - 2005.

Mostly right, but the boss hired pretty smart people fresh out of college (cheap).

They are still around and their website still sucks. Last I heard they were doing fine.

somat• 2 years ago

A website that sort of sucks is one of my business legitimacy tests.

But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.

pushedx• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the cost of IPv4 space at auction alone is prohibitively expensive.

cdea2• 2 years ago

There 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• 2 years ago

There’s tons of ipv6 only isps running dns64 and nat464 and other variations to limit ipv4 needs massively if at all

eddieroger2• 2 years ago

I 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...

mdaniel2• 2 years 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

eddieroger2• 2 years ago

I 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.

Start Your Own ISP

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