Becoming Your Own Phone Company?

Dave Waller asks: "I have been considering this for a while but do not know where to start researching it. I live in a smaller community that has only one telco and it does not offer any advanced services and the ones they do offer are quite expensive. Apparently it is quite possible to become your own phone company and the costs of doing so are dropping. Where can a person start finding out what it takes to become a CLEC? What hardware is involved? What training options are there?" This is an interesting thought. I would have figured there would have been loads of paperwork involved in this more than the technical issues. Can anyone shed more light on the subject?

Comments

Varies by state

[djweis]

In Iowa, it seems that you can fill out some forms and then send a snail-mail letter to all of the other ILEC's and CLEC's stating that you are in business. Taking care of billing and order entry stuff looks like it will be pretty expensive to set up.

Becoming a CLEC....

[Niac]

Go to isp-lists.isp-planet.com and take a look at the archives for the ISP-CLEC mailing list. Sign up. There was a discussion a few weeks ago about this very thing.

From what I've heard, it can be done for ~$10K-$20K.