
Starting an ISP is hard (2016) - pavs
http://www.slashgeek.net/2016/05/31/starting-isp-really-hard-dont/
======
mmjaa
I was involved in starting one of America's biggest ISP's back in the early
90's - I won't name which one, but it was #2 for a while - and I can say that
things have radically changed from the way they used to be. But, I don't
believe that the fact that "its hard" is a reason not to do it - I think we
really need to return to the days of Mom&Pop BBS'es and locally-maintained and
operated NOC's in neighborhoods that really need it.

Which is why I think its great that we have social movements such as Funk
Feuer ([https://www.funkfeuer.at](https://www.funkfeuer.at)) to look at today,
point, and say "thank god for the kids!", keeping the original 'net spirit
alive.

~~~
ataturk
I worked at #1! The place all this went bad was when big cable and AT&T got
into the game and flushed out all the rest of the competition.

Comcast is a reprehensible company from top to bottom--the pricing sucks,
cable tv sucks, bundling sucks, and their customer service SUCKS! So I won't
do business with them and am relegated to crappy DSL from Frontier which also
SUCKS, just not as bad as Comcast as a company. How did we ever get into this
situation?

Granted the ISP I worked at was mostly dialup at the time, but they ran a
decent business with decent service. The Mom & Pop ISPs in the rural areas
were so cool back then--real American entrepreneurs, which starkly contrast
with the robber barons.

~~~
baud147258
If the Mom & Pop -- real American entrepreneurs -- had grew to national scale,
would they have become robber barons? It is just a consequence of size or is
more complex than that?

~~~
ethbro
Publicly traded vs private. I.e. whether investors are okay with steady return
or always pushing for profit growth.

------
Aaargh20318
Starting an ISP doesn't have to be that hard at all. If you want to start one
in the country where I live you could do so with very little investment.

All the issues he talks about are due to the fact that there is no real
competition in the US and no infrastructure to support competition.

The way it works over here is that there is a (commercially owned) open fiber
network which can be used by anyone who wants to, and prices are the same for
everyone. This network owns the last mile fiber, a PoP in each neighbourhood
and a City-PoP linked to the neighbourhood PoP's.

You want to start a small ISP with very little investment ? Just lease
everything from one of the bigger players. Bandwidth, IPTV service, etc. can
all just be repackaged and resold under your own brand name and you can work
on getting a customer base. You could run this from your basement without
buying a single piece of hardware.

Want to spend a little more ? Use your own backbone network and uplink to the
internet, but lease all the last-mile stuff from one of the bigger ISP. Go
ahead. Want to do everything yourself ? You can rent space in the PoP's and
install your own equipment, all you'd need from a 3rd party is to lease the
last mile dark fiber.

You can pretty much choose anything from just reselling an existing package to
doing everything yourself except owning the physical fiber and PoP your
equipment is placed in. IIRC the situation on DSL is similar.

My current ISP started out as one of those that pretty much resold existing
packages and currently they are on the other end of the spectrum and run their
entire network by themselves including spinning off their own TV provider that
now sells IPTV services to other small ISP's.

Net result of all this: at my address I can choose between 13 ISP's on fiber
alone.

How do you get to a situation like this ? Very simple. Make sure the
government only issues permits for the installation of a broadband network if
the network to be built is going to be open to everyone.

~~~
supergreg
What is this superb country you live in?

~~~
Aaargh20318
The Netherlands.

Unfortunately, the fiber network doesn't cover the entire country yet. It was
bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty much halted
expansion. Fortunately, a lot of local initiatives have started up with
similar conditions.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
> "It was bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty
> much halted expansion."

Why did they halt expansion? Would they not make enough profit outside of
denser metropolitan areas? Could such a model (whereby the government only
allows construction of broadband network for companies that agree to lease out
the wires to everyone) while facilitating ISP competition actually stifle
deployment of new wire?

~~~
Aaargh20318
> Why did they halt expansion?

Because it's cheaper to upgrade their existing phone network to VDSL than to
install new fiber. Basically, they already own a nation-wide copper phone
network, the fiber network was a competitor. They bought the competitor and
halted expansion so they could squeeze some more money out of their existing
copper network. The official PR bullshit is that by upgrading the copper
network they can offer high speed internet to more people in a shorter amount
of time than by expanding the fiber network.

> Would they not make enough profit outside of denser metropolitan areas?

The denser metropolitan areas are the main areas where there is no fiber yet.
It's the more rural areas that have the best fiber penetration.

------
tw1010
This is obviously a response to an earlier post. This seems to happen a lot.
Posts inspiring links, inspiring even more branches. It'd be interesting to
apply one of those bioinformatics algorithms for computing the phylogenetic
tree of DNA to the stream of links featured here on HN.

~~~
arrivance
I'm sure this being posted was a response to the previous link, but looking at
the URL of this post, it seems to have been made over a year ago.

------
juskrey
These guys are really, really redundant, which is excellent, still I am sure
my local fibre ISP doesn't have even 1/3 of that. Probably two uplinks, no
second power line and one diesel etc. I haven't seen those expensive splicing
machines, technicians have used a laptop and some small tool..

------
piker
Interesting read. It seems to me some of the long tail risks mitigated by
expensive redundancies might be an acceptable risk for the customers. For
example, the article indicates that they have redundant power suppliers, along
with 2 days worth of diesel for on-premise generation. Apparently keeping the
second power company available is a recurring cost. What are the chances power
is cut to the office for more than 2 days that (1) doesn't also affect the
other power company (e.g., earthquake, hurricane, etc.) and (2) couldn't be
mitigated by purchasing more diesel? Even if (1) and (2) are true, couldn't
this just be a reasonable outage?

~~~
pavs
Few things,

There are limits on how long you can keep your generators running without
causing mechanical damage - hence two generators.

Redundant power company only charges for usage, there is a small recurring fee
for connectivity. If Power goes out from one provider, online UPS kicks in -
we switch to secondary power-company if there is a long downtime.This happens
about 4-5 times a year - longest blackout was 12 hours to the best of my
recollection.

When you provide internet service for SME, Banks, and some large-scale corps -
redundancy and SLA plays a huge role. Home users benefit from this too.

I probably should have been more clear.

------
peterwwillis
This is a unique perspective on the control Google has on the web. You
basically can't start an ISP without access to Google, and access to Google is
expensive. And you can't cache/proxy it yourself, because https is, like,
really useful, man.

------
apercu
I don't know if I agree with this. I cofounded an ISP in the mid-90's. It was
in a relatively small town in a rural state in the midwestern US.

I have no idea what the residents options for internet access are now, but at
the time the only really choice (unless you were college faculty or a student)
was AOL. But there wasn't a local line - you had to call a city 30 miles away
that had a long distance toll charge.

That meant we had a relatively captive audience. But, not a lot of people knew
what the "internet" was then.

At the time, our largest cost was the 32 phone lines coming in (more expensive
than a residential phone line). Initial equipment for the T1 and the modems
(sixteen 28.8 ciscos) and setup was only something like $30k. The second
largest cost was the T1 (none of us took a salary).

The issue was capitalization. It got to a point where additional significant
personal guarantees were going to be required from people who hadn't had a
salary for almost 2 years (I was making a little money making static
websites). At that time the state telecom called and offered a little money
for the customers and to assist in migrating them (I guess they were finally
ready to offer rural internet access).

At the end of the day, we might have been a little early to the market, we
were under-capitalized, and we didn't realize at the time that if we had
offered complementary services around residential internet access (we only had
a couple commercial customers, more aggressive web development and hosting
services, and a better idea in how to raise capital without more personal
guarantees), who knows.

I should add that I never wanted to be in the ISP business, I had an idea
about a web based business (that I still think was a really good idea and I'm
sorry that running an ISP and burning through all of our collective savings
prevented me from doing) and was talked in to the ISP model by the people I
went to looking for investment.

TLDR: Technically, starting and running an ISP isn't all that hard. Probably
easier today than it was 22 years ago. The business/economic side is the
challenge.

~~~
ac29
In the article they mention they run 100km+ of their own fiber. They don't
mention which country they are in, but in most of the US, this would be very
difficult and expensive. The upside to old dialup ISPs is the local telco had
built and was maintaining your last mile physical infrastructure.

~~~
apercu
Very true, but it's also easier today to rent space on some one else network
in most municipalities, and to scale up without significant capital
investment. On course, you're right in pointing out that it depends on where
you are geographically.

------
drinchev
Back when I was 16 and the Dial-up was slowly dying, I took a cable connection
and start selling internet to my neighbours.

By the 3rd year the network reached 3 blocks around the neighbourhood and I
had ~50 paying clients. I still remember I did that with an old Intel 486
running Slackware Linux and a bunch of ipchains MASQ scripts. I had even a
small local website where you were able to see your traffic ( I remember I was
paid 10EUR/500MB or something. )

Back then I was not alone. Almost every neighbourhood had those networks, but
at one point they started to unite together and the bigger ones were buying
the small ones.

Now the biggest problem would be regulation, rather than the hardware
requirements.

------
chx
A nationwide FTTH ISP is a completely different affair to a local WISP...

------
throwaway2016a
In the 90s there were ton of mom and pop ISPs. But in the 90s they piggy
backed off of telephone lines (dial up) so they didn't have to have an
infrastructure aside from running a high speed connection to their office and
having a bank of modems connected to phone lines.

I remember there was even a company that let you "start your own ISP" with
just a 10 minute sign up form. You used their high speed connection and their
modem bank and they took 3/4 the profit.

------
nimbius
the original impetus for 'build your own ISP' started from a HN discussion,
and frankly i think its where it should end.

Detroit is a sterling reminder of the hubris of a generation in the wake of
late stage capitalism. Naturally, creating your own internet in the wasteland
that was once americas crown jewel of middle class prosperity seems not only
natural, but necessary as the economic incentive from private industry is
nonexistent.

For the rest of us, effort is best spent in cultivating a healthy local
network. build your own open source router, control traffic according to your
own best practices. For example, limit advertising servers and telimetry
servers so as to diminish the unspoken incentive the repeal of net neutrality
and operating systems that do not respect privacy. Host your own VPN for
security and DNS server to avoid SRVFAIL hijacking.

[https://prism-break.org](https://prism-break.org)
[http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm](http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm)

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Why can't people do both prism break stuff and build new ISPs? Those can be
complementary. The new ISPs could be built with freedom-respecting FOSS
software and hardware.

Also could you elaborate on "limit advertising servers and telimetry servers
so as to diminish the unspoken incentive the repeal of net neutrality and
operating systems that do not respect privacy." What is the unknown incentive?
Aren't there other incentives other than advertising and telemetry?

------
amelius
Indeed, it sounds easier to start a bank. Probably more profitable also.

~~~
jermaustin1
Infact, I would love an article on just that! "Don't start an ISP, start a
bank"

