Setting up an ISP

[Boris_T_Bear]

Hi, 

 

I am looking for information regarding setting up my own ISP. There fiber in my town, however it is very limited in where it is. I was hoping to take advantage of available funding grants to do a feasibility study and then perhaps set up an ISP that will offer fiber to the home. I do understand that there is a significant cost to this, but I don't see the local cable provider or Telus doing anything in the next 20 years to expand fiber offerings.

 

Any ideas on where to start would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

[NovaNightmare]

You can't have an ISP in a vacuum, right.

 

So, lets persume you are familiar with networks.

 

You need to get connected to a backbone, or another carrier that will transmit your traffic. It is better to have multiple routes and connections to multiple different carriers.

 

Presume you are setting up a LAN, there is no difference. The only difference is scale. You need to register and buy a block of IP addresses for each user to have at their node, but you are setting up a LAN and connecting it to the outside world via another companies fiber backbone. Each home is a node, each node gets their own equipment (modem, router, whatever), that node communicates to your central location which has a direction connection and traffic is routed.

 

There is more to it, obviously, you need to assign an IP to each node (external IP registered from ARIN) and an internal IP for your internal network communication (I know my own ISP does this, because I've accidentally navigated to a work IP address while off VPN and gotten to some of their Ubiquiti equipment pages).

 

That's just a stupid basic understanding as I've never done that myself.

 

Now saying that, how do you pay for this, and that's the reason they aren't building out to your location. Are there enough people, willing to pay? Not just people, but what percentage would pay for that internet connection? Would it be enough to continue to pay the fees you'd have to pay, because you are connected to someone else and you won't have a network big enough to be it's own backbone (where you could have carriage agreements to carry other data in exchange).

 

I had a friend in a similar situation to you, and what they did was request a provider build out to their neighborhood, there were about 28 houses, and 13 of them signed on requesting it. The ISP ran the cost and proposed they each pay a certain percentage towards the cost of permits, trenching and running lines, and then sign on with a 3 yr agreement to keep the service. After which the service was available to anyone in the neighborhood. They did it.

[PyCCo_TyPuCTo]

1 hour ago, Boris_T_Bear said:

but I don't see the local cable provider or Telus doing anything in the next 20 years to expand fiber offerings.

Where is local?

Have you inquired with either of the two ISPs?

[seanondemand]

You'll need to apply for licenses with the CRTC, so lawyer up: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/starting-an-isp-in-canada/index.html, https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/telecom/registr.htm

 

Then you'll need to start laying down fibre or negotiating with your municipality to light up any dark fibre that might've already been laid, so I hope you've got access to (actual) tens of millions of start-up capital and plenty of lawyers to get permitted, contractors to dig, equipment. Setting up a rural WISP might be feasible but that doesn't sound like what you're wanting to do.