
A man launched a new ISP from his garage (2018) [video] - saadalem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p52PY_cwIsA
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waffle_ss
It would've been nice to see some numbers to show the capital required to
build it. For the area he's in, just trenching in the fiber from the cell
tower would cost $50K / mile on the low end. Then he has to pay for transit.
And possibly leasing fiber depending on how he sets that up. That all costs
thousands per month.

It looks like the guy lives in Marin County California, which is a pretty
affluent area. He has enough money to live there while (seemingly) leisuring
out on the ocean, not working for 6+ years. He made it sound like sharing the
internet as an ISP didn't even occur to him until neighbors asked about it so
he was ready to plonk down pretty hefty amounts of cash for just his own usage
(I don't blame him of course, I'd do the same).

So yes, you too can start an ISP out of your garage, if you have a fat bank
account. :-)

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non-entity
There was an article posted to HN a while back regarding creating a wireless
ISP over a very small area, and If I recall correctly, someone pointed out
that renting a piece the infrastructure required for it would be tens of
thousands of dollars monthly

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loufe
My parents use internet beamed off a nearby farm silo. The owner of the
project bought the trasmission info, paid for a splice in the fiber line on
the road by the farmer's house and badabing-badaboom. Not necessarily tens of
thousands per month and he has several dozen customers.

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riskneutral
What is transmission info?

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HeWhoLurksLate
I _think_ that might have been an autocorrected "infra" as in infrastructure.
Not GP, though.

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loufe
Right, I did mean infra - thank you!

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consi
Basically every city in Poland has such company in 00s. Now we have around
450-500 ISPs in whole country. Most of them started their journey in garage
:). Nowaydays most of them are doing FTTH/GPON constantly evolving - giving
better services than big-country-wide companies like Orange. For example, I
live in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) and I pay around $25 monthly for
600/600Mbps with static external ipv4.

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grahamburger
I run a hobby website about this kind of thing: startyourownisp.com. Might be
interesting to folks reading about the topic.

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lukevp
I had wireless internet like this growing up in a rural town in the early
2000s. It was 3 mbps unlimited, and our only other options were satellite
(768k with 800ms rtt or so) and 56k dial-up. It was a godsend for me as a
young kid wanting to learn and explore tech. I’m glad to hear he’s doing this,
and it’s great for small scale, but this is what’s most exciting to me about
SpaceX. The promise of LEO satellite internet is immense for people in these
situations, but the cost doesn’t work out unless you can launch those
satellites at a low cost. SpaceX seems to understand this and I see their
drive to reusable rockets as a way to make this a high profit margin business
that will enable them to do bigger and better things without being beholden to
nation states for funding. I can’t wait for this. I hope to have a remote
country house someday, but the internet has been one of the main drivers for
us to stay closer in to town.

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xyst
He has a direct fiber line into his house but the glimpses of the speed tests
were showing ~180 Mb/s at the peak. This is far from the max performance a
fiber line can deliver.

Is he getting throttled by the company that is leasing the fiber line or is
there a bottleneck in his setup?

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etrabroline
That was stock footage. The editor of the video doesn't know any better.

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pistoriusp
I would love it if someone could do something like this in Berlin. The
Internet in Germany is abysmal.

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ksec
Why is that the case?

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sneak
Government-sanctioned monopoly residue, as far as I can tell. AFAIK everyone
has to lease circuits from Telekom; not entirely dissimilar from the US.

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yasinaydin
Back in Turkey (3 years ago) I had 100/5 cable internet. Now in Estonia, I
have 500/500 fiber for 32 euros/month. I know that 500/500 is a "bit extra",
but I have always thought at least 100mbps should be standard.

I still can't believe my eyes when I see connection speeds like 5, 10 mbps in
countries like Germany or americas.

With these kind of speed rates, I have never thought of creating my own ISP.
At least not for speed issues.

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state_less
I like the P2P nature of the internet, but how do you get connected to a peer
on good terms? Comcast, Verizon and AT&T limit not only who but what devices
you can route packets for (e.g. hotspot data).

Any ideas on finding good peers to work with? I'm hoping for few usage
restrictions first and then quality links characteristics next (e.g.
bandwidth, latency, cost, etc...).

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jcrawfordor
As a new ISP, you're not going to get any peering arrangements. Really, as an
existing consumer ISP not in the top 10 or 20, you're not going to get any
peering arrangements. Consumer ISPs generate very asymmetric traffic (more
down than up) which tampers with the core "equality" assumption of traditional
peering arrangements.

You'll need to purchase transit from an existing provider, such as
CenturyLink's commercial arm or Verizon Business, there are plenty more. This
won't be free but it also probably won't be as expensive as you think. In a
city you can get a Gigabit dedicated to you for $2k a month, maybe less. Shop
around. Most of these providers will put you on the phone with a network
engineer as part of the quoting process and they can be helpful in
recommending what service level and equipment you get.

IPv4 allocations are hard to come by unless you want to bid on them at auction
which can be expensive. You probably want to get a block from your provider,
but they'll be hard to talk into giving you more than say a /29 and they might
charge you more for it. Often they don't, though, they just put you in a queue
sorted by customer size and you'll never get to the top of it. As a small ISP,
CGNAT is probably going to be your only choice for IPv4. This also has the
downside of being non-portable since the addresses will always belong to your
provider. Maybe save up money to bid on your very own. Once you get one you'll
want to start participating in BGP which is complicated anyway, so get to that
later, once you have customers.

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rahimnathwani
'Consumer ISPs generate very asymmetric traffic (more down than up) which
tampers with the core "equality" assumption of traditional peering
arrangements.'

Shouldn't this be in favour of the ISP? If the traffic isn't balanced, then
doesn't the peer that's sending more (e.g. YouTube, Netflix) usually pay?

I have no experience of setting up an ISP, so this is just based on what I've
read. I'd love to understand it better.

"IPv4 allocations are hard to come by unless you want to bid on them at
auction which can be expensive."

Looking online, it looks like the prices are $15 to $30 per IP address,
depending on the size of the block. So I guess this cost swallows the first
month of revenue from each new customer.

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Scoundreller
> 'Consumer ISPs generate very asymmetric traffic (more down than up) which
> tampers with the core "equality" assumption of traditional peering
> arrangements.'

It's a good situation for the ISP to start a DC business with unmetered ports
to help balance things!

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jcrawfordor
This is a lot of how the major ISPs smooth out the peering situation, they
also offer colocation and carrier hotel services to large customers.
Unfortunately, the popularity of Netflix and other streaming services has
largely upset this balance and it's very hard for any ISP to keep traffic
equality.

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Scoundreller
At least with Netflix, you can get their Appliances and cut your inbound
Netflix bandwidth by 80%+ for the cost of power and 4U.

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iptrans
Yeah, if you have at least 5 Gbps of Netflix traffic on your network...

No small or startup ISP is going to qualify for a Netflix appliance. Also to
cut your Netflix bandwidth by 80+%, you need more than 6 Gbps of Netflix
traffic, as Netflix requires 1.2 Gbps of inbound bandwidth just to fill the
cache.

Netflix share of Internet traffic is about 15-20%, so in practice Netflix
appliances are used by ISPs with 25-35 Gbps of bandwidth and up. This means
ISPs with tens of thousands of subscribers or more.

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6510
Imagine the infrastructure needed for water, sewage, electricity, a natural
gas network or even roads. Now compare the price to internet.

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amelius
This is why you never read stories about a man running a sewage treatment
system from his garage.

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Scoundreller
Here you go:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqg4evnkL_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqg4evnkL_g)

Just an off-grid, but looks like he's replicated the primary & secondary
treatment processes.

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tus88
It was eminently feasible to run a home ISP from a garage back in the day.

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norbix
Isn't there any LTE around and what about FTTH ?

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norbix
Isn't there any LTE technology around ? What about FTTH ?

