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Ask About Setting Up a Community ISP

Posted by Roblimo on from the advice-from-someone-who's-already-done-it dept.

The Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative (RRIC) is one of the best-known member-owned ISPs around. It provides DSL service to the Ruby Ranch neighborhood in Summit County, Colorado. Carl Oppedahl, the RRIC "main man," has agreed to answer Slashdot questions about the possibilities and pitfalls of setting up something similar in other areas. Please read the RRIC FAQs before posting a question so that you don't ask something Carl has already answered a million times. Otherwise, the usual Slashdot interview rules apply: One question per post, we'll email Carl 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

4 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Getting people intrested..... by MrWinkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dear Sir,
    I have thought many times about this in my area. Only problem is most people are not intrested as it's too much work or too much money. Most of my local community does not even know what DSL is about. They have never had a broadband connect before. How were you able to unite the local community and show them the bennifits of doing this?

    --
    Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
  2. Understanding the pains of leadership... by Pollux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Did the co-op ever encounter a point in the planning stage where they wanted to toss everything in the air and just say screw it? If so, what pulled you out of your misery and kept you moving towards your goal?

  3. Co-ops for low income communities by selan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Ruby Ranch is a fairly well-to-do area that can support the costs of running an ISP. Do you think it is possible for community groups in low income areas to run co-op ISPs? Any advice pro or con?

  4. Re:Local Bandwidth Hogs? by toddler420 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    from this page: What line speeds do subscribers get? Do they get a dedicated IP address? Can they operate servers?

    These are all difficult questions. Ours is a coop, meaning that every cost we incur must necessarily come sooner or later out of the pockets of the subscribers. We are charged by our upstream provider according to our traffic levels. If a subscriber were to generate so much traffic that we had to pay an extra $250 per month to our provider, we would need to charge that $250 to that subscriber. There would be no other choice.

    At first, we are going to throttle most of our subscriber connections down to 206K bps. Later, after we accumulate some experience and see what our traffic levels really turn out to be, we will consider raising the connection speeds.