Need some where to start.

[neon_bowser]

This seems a bit of a new thing to ask. But seeing how great this forum is on helping people get to know what they need to know, I figured this was a great start.

    So I'll get straight to it. I'm a senior in high school. Graduating in may. Obviously there's a bunch of "where are you going to college" and "what college are you going to" going around. I've, for the most part, planned all that out. Found a college that I finally thought, "Hey this isn't that bad." Even got accepted. Now it's a matter of scholarships and other funding to go. But that's not the point of this. There's been a lot of things happening with Google Fiber and similar pushes for Gigabit internet solutions going around. I've seen companies opening up here and there. And all of this is great, but the chances of seeing this in the small South Texas town of Kingsville(where I'm going to school) in the next 5 years even, doesn't seem very likely. Especially when the only current solution is AT&T's DSL Xtreme 6.0 where you can reach speeds of anywhere up to 6Mbps.... yeah, even for 20$ a month thats just sad. Lucky for me I don't have this problem. I live in a town north of there and get much happier speeds for the price. So back on topic; I want to know, if I tried for it, could I become an ISP that could out do AT&T? I know I'd need

1. a building to house the servers,

2. the servers themselves,

3. I'd need upstream arrangements made with some companies to get the internet to me,

4. I'd need lines placed throughout the city to connect to the people.

    Of course the details like HVAC systems to keep it cool and other things but I'm focusing on the basics for now.

    The town is relatively small, only housing around 20,000 people. But having a military base and one of the world's largest ranches, it's not exactly some random middle of nowhere town that no one knows about. So on with what I'm asking.

A. How possible is something like this? Both the becoming an ISP and one that can provide not just good but great speeds(gigabit)

B. How much speed could I hope to provide?

C. How much would something like this cost? Where can I find information and the cost of this sort of thing.

D. On the third thing listed above; Who could I get, where Im located, who would provide me such a connection?

   Googling hasn't gotten me very far and I'm just starting to ask people for answers to this. I have funding promised to me if I can actually get it all planned out and know what exactly I'm going to do. And from much asking around I have gotten a general "yes" that people would be willing to toss money in the direction of an internet that is better, significantly better, even if it was more expensive(say 80$ versus the 20$). I have no doubt this could work IF I could accomplish it. I just need to know, CAN I accomplish this? and HOW do I accomplish this. Where can I find what I need to know. I'm willing to go the extra mile to get something like this done.

                 Much thanks to anyone who can help at all. I seriously appreciate it.

[Vitalius]

You are attempting to do a service for the internet deprived people of Texas. For that, I thank you. 6Mbps here for $45 and I live 30 minutes from Waco and 2 Hours from Dallas. Utterly stupid imo, but wtv. 

Anyway, I'd imagine you'd have to either pay an ISP to use their already built infrastructure or build your own. That is... expensive. Like, $10,000,000+ expensive (very random but probably correct guess). 

If you were to use an ISP's infrastructure, it wouldn't change anything. Because, if they could offer faster speeds, they would. Which implies a need for new infrastructure.

I'm just kinda throwing what I think out there. Please, listen to others before you do listen to me. 

[Lays]

Building infrastructure+ all the things you'd need to achieve gigabit internet for a whole town would probably cost a few MILLION dollars. @Vitalius is right

 

You'd also need a lawyer or someone to get all the permits, doing that on your own without knowledge of the thing's you'd have to do like all the codes+ etc that have to be followed to dig into streets/peoples land to run the cables, etc..

[GBBnero]

Just saying from the business side of things my guess is, that it would be very hard to find an Investor for this. You are looking to become an ISP for which you require your own Infrastructure since current lines are not up to date (my guess). There is basically no way that you will find an Investor with this idea. You looking at several Million Dollars here. Building, Staff, Cars, landlines, equipment (Routers, Repair Equipment, etc.). Also, this is kind of an established market so it will be difficult to make People switch.

Overall, I just want to say, Study!! because I see no way this is going to realistically happen.

[wako7654]

A. It is very possible if you have the resources. You just need to find the perfect balance of providing the best services while maintaining your business. It will be hard at start since you have to be on the losing side, like giving attractive plans to your subscribers to switch over to you while gaining less profits but once your rep builds up and more subscribers come, it will be very profitable.

 

B. For this you need to consider the bandwidth you will get from your MAIN provider and the bandwidth you will have to divide between your subscribers. The higher the bandwidth from the main provider will also mean more cost. Let's say you have a 1 Gbps line to AT&T(I dont what companies are there in US) then you plan that on 1 Gbps you will only server 10 users in it, Then you will have 100 Mbps for each user guaranteed. However if you want to justify the cost of a 1 Gbps line to multiple users you can have like 1 Gbps to 100 users delivering 10 Mbps to each of them.

 

C. Cost will depend on how big you want your infrastructure to be. You need to determine how big of an area you want to cover. Like you can start from only one neigborhood or decide to go to a statewide implementation. ( Of course you need to always consider the feasibility of a small area vs a big area, in most cases small areas are not feasible)

 

D. In the end you need to coordinate with a MAIN provider(Like AT&T), you will be connecting to their network to connect to the whole public network, you can get quotes from your local provider on dedicated Gigabit lines.

[tobben]

well .. for starters you would proably need several degrees in networking engineering and whatnot and a staff to help you to even be remotely close to just thinking about making this a reality, and i hope you do realise you need actual serious funding, people saying they will pay 80$ a month or your mum and dad supporting you is not funding at this scale.

 

as the others have said, building a new infrastructure is extremely expensive, and you need the actual know how to do it, need to know how to program and use the actual servers aswell, so once again .. you need a staff.

[neon_bowser]

I know that isn't funding, I'm not intending any of that to be. I'm no network engineer, though I am planning on going to school for Network Security(I know not the same thing). So what I'm getting is staff will be most important here, I know money but that was well assumed before I even looked it up. Okay, well thanks everyone! I think I'll just stow this idea away and maybe once I'm a little more knowledgable and know more people (like network engineers) that would be willing to join me, I'll give it another try.