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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Become a Rural ISP?
hawkeyeMI writes "I live in a small, rural town nestled in some low hills. Our town has access to only one DSL provider, and it's pretty terrible. However, a regional fiber project is just being completed, and some of the fiber is in fact running directly past my house. Currently, there are no last-mile providers in my area, and the regional project only considers itself a middle-mile provider, and will only provide service to last-mile providers. Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP? I have considered WiFi mesh networking, and even running wires on the power/telephone polls, but the required licensing and other issues are foreign to me. What would you do?"
Connect to the fiber, and use it up for yourself.
Trick some one else too do it or quit your day job.
Unless you wish too spend all your after hours at someone elses house fiddling with internet. Or have a sweaty ear from explaining that cheap ass firewalls dont do 100Mbit internet at linerate.
Please explain; how does someone become such a "pro"? Is it perhaps by learning and doing? Or is it by giving up before you even start?
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I once had to interview an applicant for a job on our research group who had done just that during his whole life. I doesn't get you far, believe me. What he was seeking at the university I really don't know.
-- Cheers!
Unless you really want to be a one person ISP, which seems like a recipe for disaster before you even begin, find someone else to help. To me it seems like there's 3 primary roles: a) Someone who bankrolls it, b) Someone how deals with bureaucracy (licenses of all kinds), and c) Someone who at least has some technical knowledge to figure everything out.
:-)
I guess you'll hear stuff like "leave it to the ones to know to do it", etc. Fuck that. If there's an opportunity, willingness to learn, etc, go for it. Worst case scenario you will fail but probably will be the "one who knows how to do it" the next time.
Good luck
Usually you dig up a path and install the last mile lines, but if you can work out a deal to piggy back on the power lines it would be much cheaper. I would not recommend the mesh wifi route as there will be dead zones and whenever it rains you could lose internet. Good luck to you, I would love to have something like this as an option. The broadband options in my area are incredibly slow.
You don't want to go through the trouble and expense of rolling out cable to people's houses - you don't have the budget to cover for it, and no one could afford the installation charge if you passed it all on to them. Look at Ubiquity wireless gear - it's very good, priced amazingly well, and is relatively easy to set up and configure. They do backhaul stuff, distribution stuff and even 802.11a/b/g/n that is comparable to Cisco at 1/4 the price.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Sounds like a huge task.
Why not spend your own time on contacting providers and encouraging them to come into the area, and canvassing the local community for support. There may also be government grants and initiatives available. Speak to your local politician and see where they come in. You're not going to learn much networking and technology in the process, but you're more likely to get some results.
0. which country are we talking about here? americas, uk, somewhere else? in any way, you will need to know local regulations for becoming and operating public service provider. 1. you will need to establish a company (firm, commersant, ...) to deal with middle-mile provider.
2. as a head of company you will need to consider your business - financial aspects, sustainability, etc. (it may be that you could do it as offhours project, may be not :)
3. etc.
as alternative, if you could persuade that middlemile provider to sign an agreement with you as individual, you could arrange some cooperative type of service. (if you are smart enough, and neighbors are willing)....
Whereas I probably know even less than you (I know practically nothing), online searches can come up with the odd bit of info on cost to set the thing up, but fact you still have to rent the line (ignoring whether or not you'd even be granted IPs due to the slight....shortage) guessing by your population spread, it would prove difficult to justify the investment.
However, this thread shouldn't be full of people saying "don't do it" as you are theorising it. You will have to check a lot with your local council, also consider the security issues as you would be responsible for policing anyone using it. With regards to cost, though, it can be useful if you contact locals and see if people are willing to invest beforehand.
A friend of mine put up a tower himself, a big wireless modem on top, and started installed the modems at people's houses. I'm not sure what sort of line he was serving his wireless from, but he was eventually bought by the big wireless internet provider in our area, Barrett Xplornet.
It's not clear what area you're trying to cover, but it seems the sort of thing WiMAX was made for. But I suspect this is still something you're going to have to raise capital for, and therefore something you're going to have to make money back on from your subscribers.
I've no experience, but I suspect this is not something you can realistically set up as a hobby in your spare time. Your costs will look like this:
* Capital equipment - a WiMAX base station and connection to the fibre (probably involves paying the company providing the fibre to dig it up, splice it and run a cable into your house). If you're happy to ebay second hand gear, the WiMAX station could be fairly cheap - maybe a few hundred dollars.
* Monthly invoice from the fibre provider for access. You're going to want some serious bandwidth, or your customers will complain.
Your time is going to look like this:
* Administration. If you're trying to pay your costs, you need people to pay you. That means keeping a list of customers and invoicing them each month, making sure people pay up, etc.
* Support. People *will* blame you when the intertubes is broken, whether its your fault or not. If no-one answers the phone when they call, then you'll lose customers.
Your biggest problem is likely to be that the DSL company will just undercut whatever you set up. Squashing you like a bug is unlikely to show up on their bottom line, while you need to make money consistently to keep up with the fibre costs and repay the capital you needed to set it up.
If you've got $100k lying around to get it all set up and to absorb a few months of fibre access costs while you get people signed up, then you might be able to survive. You might even make your $100k back, eventually. Since you have to work to make ends meet, it seems unlikely this is the case.
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What he was seeking at the university I really don't know.
Probably a job?
Your analytical skills don't seem advanced.
Not going to eliminate LoS issues but should propergate a hell of a lot better than 2.4Ghz.
I would suggest you learn about what are known as 501(c)(12) telecommunications cooperatives. One specific example would be www.rric.net
It would also be good for you to consult the IRS information on this kind of nonprofit organization.
There are many routes in. You get working for a big ISP then work your way towards a top technical job. You take a degree then get in more directly. Alternately, you stat doing small scale semi-amateur stuff for some years connecting up e.g. local charities and stuff. What you don't do is start without a good idea of the business and and technical side unless you can safely sustain yourself with no return for at least five years. Firstly there are huge barriers to entry. All the good sites for transmission likely are already taken, for example. Secondly the customers are pretty demanding; fail to fixa customer's internet in two hours and you've lost then. Even in the middle of the night. Thirdly the competition is brutal. A Place can sit without broadband for teen years then get the best internet in the country within weeks of a small ISP having completed their new installation.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Definitely it's a project worth doing but you've got to put in some work, both legwork and office work to make it work.
You need to go to the regional fiber provider and talk to them about becoming a last mile ISP and what their requirements are to terminate their fiber in your town and likely licensing issues, service contracts and support.
You need to speak to your town hall about permits and applicable laws.
Depending on where the fiber actually is, you need to pick a business unit where the fiber can be terminated and where your fiber can be run from.
In that business unit you're going to need reliable power and UPS backup to create a small datacenter (2 or 3 racks should be plenty) on raised floors for cable runs. (There are companies out there that ship all of this stuff in a single container, meaning that all you have to do is site it and run fiber and power to it)
You'll need to find out how much it will cost to run fiber from your datacenter businesses (who will be the main consumers) and home users. Get maps and start planning. Your regional fiber network provider should be able to put you in touch with the people who put fiber cables down in streets.
You'll need to talk to your local Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau about likely customers as well as schools and colleges (and the town's own infrastructure like the townhall itself) who will be big consumers of fiber bandwidth and likely to be the baseload of your cashflow. Also likely partners in your state who might like to put their systems in your datacenter to provide services to your town such as VOIP providers, cloud services and storage providers etc. (Speak to them under NDA)
You'll need a business plan, a financial planning showing likely costings and cashflow and a project plan to maximize return by hitting major sources of revenue first.
I would suggest that you go for a low cost base based on opensource software and hardware as much as you can (I hear cheers from Slashdotters!)
Once you've got this done, then find out about likely sources of finance, microloans, angel investors who will need to see the proposed balance sheet and cashflow projections. (You might find that the reason there is only a crappy DSL service in your area is that that is all the demand that there is - economics trumps everything else and the whole idea has to make economic sense)
You will need help. Other people have done this on very limited budgets so use Google and network like crazy. Make contacts with technical people willing to pitch in. You will need to look at project plans created by others and business plans created by others and sources of finance used by others.
This isn't to put you off, but to give you an overview on the size of the mountain you're looking at climbing. Others have started where you are now and made great local companies. But the business must be based on sound economics and a steely concentration on a plan of action.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Well, the projects I have been running have all been based on either wifi or xDSL. So I can pretty much only provide my expertise in these areas, BUT......
I see a couple of possibilities:
1) Contact the preexisting DSL provider in your area, and tell them that fiber is now available in the area. Ask them if they would be willing to provide a new DSLAM in the area connected to the fiber, which would boost the speed of the internet considerably (if the DSLAM is within a mile or two you should easily be able to get a stable 20 Mbit connection, which I assume is better than what you have now). Its always easier to lobby someone else to do the job they're supposed to, than it is to start competing with them......
2) Contact the people providing the fiber and ask them what servicepartners they have that are last-mile providers. Contact some of them and ask if they would be intrested in setting up shop in your town. Get the local populace to sign a letter of intent, that they will switch providers, if they can get better or faster internet at the same or lower cost..... Again with the lobbying, but it's an easy way out
3) Consider setting your own lastmile service up. But use xDSL connections or wifi, because FTTH would require that you start digging fiber to each house. I doubt you could make a profit on that if you're a one-man operation. In a hilly area, get a permit to set up repeater antennas on the highest areas. I'm sure you have cell service in the area too, so ask the local cell providers if you could use their towers. Usually, they have the permits in place, and you'd just have to pay rent, or simply swap services with them (your internet for their towers), if you can find someone who'll go for a straight swap..... This option requires a lot of footwork, and negotiation, but it's possible even in an industrialized and regulated society, it's just a lot harder than in Africa ;)
4) Get a group of friends together and work out a division of labour, make plans and set them into motion... More people = less burden on the individual.
I'd say it's possible, but if the market was big enough that you could live of it, then I'm sure you'd have more than one provider covering your area at the moment. So dont expect to get rich in anything except experiences :D
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I'd go fixed-wireless. It's the only option that you can start on a shoestring and end up with a decent business. Tapping the fiber can get quite expensive. It probably goes through the local telephone Central Office, so your best bet is to find cheap office rental as close to the CO as possible, and then contact the middle-mile provider for a quote to run you a drop. Bonus if you can rent a space in a muti-story building and arrange roof rights for a few antennas.
But this is doable, if you are serious about it.
Ubiquiti wireless gear is the way to go right now, and there's lots of technical help on their forum and others. Their 900Mhz gear will handle SOME tree coverage, as will the 2.4Ghz. Their gear is so cheap that you can afford to make little house-to-house relays to get into hard to reach spots. Their wiki has a decent write-up of how to build a WISP with their gear.
http://wiki.ubnt.com/Building_a_wisp
There are lots of other gotchas in the biz, arranging tower sites (private landowners are good, but you'll need a solid contract), getting customers to actually pay you (at all, not just on time), each install is going to have to be paid for up front ($150-200) and you won't make any money off that customer for about 6-8 months, service truck & tools, insurance (wispinsurance.com) and lots more.
Go lurk on the Ubiquiti and Mikrotik forums for a few months, and you'll start getting a clear picture of what running a small ISP day-to-day is like.
You said
Assuming this will not be my day job
But I bet your customers *will* assume that it's your day job which will generate a lot of emotion when the system goes down at 9AM and your response is ..
Well sorry, I have to be at work now, I'll get on it after 5
It seems you are already setting yourself up to be just as terrible as your current DSL provider.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'd like to think that there's still opportunity in these smaller markets. In Michigan for years there's a company originally out of Westphalia- I think they were Westphalia telephone way, way back, then Westphalia Broadband, and now are in a Lansing 'burb and called Comlink. They've quietly been laying fiber all over central Michigan and even now into surrounding states and providing service for years - sometimes well, and sometimes less so. I've no idea how they're doing these days, but I love the idea of this small company quietly toiling away and if not eating at the monopolists, hopefully at least scaring them a little. So - I maintain hope that this is possible - and admire the cajones of anyone willing to give it a go - but definitely talk to some real experts- even ring up the Comlink folks and see if you can buy one of 'em a beer to talk out the feasibility. Good luck
Buy a shovel and start digging.
Or even better: Buy a bunch of shovels and make sure that everyone who wants to get connected does a fair bit of digging, too.
bickerdyke
What should you do? Leave the country and become an Australian citizen in protest! If you're planning on living there for a long time maybe become a micro-ISP as a fun project purely for yourself initially. Don't sell the service to your neighbours until everything is up and running.
1- Start an ISP company
2- Move into a rural area
3- Profit?
Assuming this is about a rural USA county, his public service commission would be the ones who would more than likely oversee him in his state. I would talk to them. And they may give him a heads up of some company may get in his grill. Just because there's currently no service doesn't mean some other company may be moving in shortly.
I'd also go to SCORE.org and see if there's some retired telecom executive who would like to help with mgt, where to get money, etc...
The SBA may have some ideas about money and where to get help with regulations.
Grants.gov to see if the government has any money for this - doubtful, but try.
Answer sense no makes your
Come to the land of milk and honey, join in the national broadband bonanza, to be connected soon (apparently), but hurry the boats are filling fast. On a serious note, can't you guys get satellite broadband, it's all the rage in rural Australia.
If you are in Western Massachusetts and the middle mile network is MassBroadband123 network you should give me a call. I'm the only small ISP left in this region and I can help.
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/wisp
Find out your potential market. There may be a reason there is currently no last-mile provider; perhaps people use cellular data or satellite or have just decided that dial-up is ok.
There's some great advice above about starting a small company, but don't go to all that trouble unless you know there will be enough customers to make it worth your while; don't start a business with a product that no one wants.
However, if you want to start a business that has one customer: you, then starting a small ISP sounds like a great way to subsidize your Internet cost and perhaps a good tax write-off as long as you don't pop-up on the IRS's radar.
It the "pros" were already providing service in his town, yes, of course someone who doesn't know the business end shouldn't set up shop and try to compete. But the pros are overlooking his town/community - that's a perfect reason for someone to step up and work to give their neighbors what they're lacking.
The tech support will kill you. You can buy the hardware and wires etc, but the physical infrastructure is not the challenge- it's the human support infrastructure. Support will crush any free time you have, and also any love you have left for your fellow man. Your clientele is low income rural people, probably not tech savvy. Problem is, that they will probably also (mostly) be really nice and your neighbors. You do want to help them- without a decent size group of technical people with good personal skills as your support team, you'll be floundering.
They're overlooking it for a reason and so should OP.
Some people have suggested wifi repeaters. I would suggest some nice mesh networking. Also, there is currently some really good work going on regarding wifi latency, including with mesh networking. Lots of algorithm work on QOS and queueing to keep latency down, including on wifi. Check out the CeroWRT project.
Head on over to WISPA, read through their discussion lists, sign up and introduce yourself. DSLReports also has a WISP forum which is pretty friendly and you would be well-served to check out that resource. Having lived the life you're looking at getting into, License Exempt Wireless is probably the only readily available technology that is within your reach unless you have very deep pockets.
I think the "get help" concept should framed in terms of redundancy. All the people involved need to be "good enough" at all the tasks to make do in a pinch, since people get sick, take vacation, and (according to the question) work other jobs.
Some links which will help you find people who are doing this already, and are more than willing to help you start down this path follows. Believe it or not, most operators in the WISP industry are pretty friendly and more than willing to help a new wisp get started with advice and the like.
www.wispa.org - The Industry Association for WISPS.
Animal Farm Users Group
Broadband Heroes Whitepaper
Wireless Cowboys Blog
I'm sure there are others. I'd start by reading what I can, probably joining the (free) email lists on a couple of the sites above, and asking questions. Everyone in the industry was a newbie sometime, and most of us remember what it was like to start out, often with about as much knowledge as you have.
Withdraw all of your money and all that you can borrow.
Now, burn all of the cash.
Ta-da! Just like trying to start a rural ISP!
Take a look at
http://guifi.net/en/node/38392
guifi.net started as citizen network long ago: people setting up wireless access points and networking them together.
Later they started federating proxies along the network: people offering their internet connection to the global wireless network
The final stage became when they wanted to go beyond: to get the same advantages as commercial ISP, they set up a Non Profit Foundation, which gave them the status to apply as communications operator.
Having this status (in my country, Spain), you play with the same rules with which big companies play. An example: if you own two buildings across a street, as normal person you can not install a cable between them crossing that street. Being a "telco", you only have to tell the city council to open the ditch and install the conduit where you will install your wire, as long the wire is "public".
Once you are a "telco", you have free access to public infrastructures and to Internet's neutral points. The last mile infrastructure is "privately owned" -each individual is the owner of his/her "gadgets"-, but in order to belong to the network, you must grant access to network traffic.
Obtaining the status of "telco", gave them access to several infra-used public Optical Fiber infrastructures, that allowed them to transport the signal up to the last mile.
Now they are starting to install Optical Fiber connections in remote places (mostly farms), just installing the cables from one farm to the next (the very farmers demanding an internet connection). I have a commercial 50Mb/5Mb FTTH at home while some farmers in a remote place have 1Gb simetrical.
Fiber is far cheaper than copper. Don't get frightened by the words Optical Fiber.
They call it FTTF (Fiber To The Farms) in opposition to commercial FTTH.
Take a look : http://guifi.net/en/node/38392
It's probably going to be cheaper and easier to get rights-of-way from the council and dig rather than mess around with FCC stuff. Also, you would be providing a more reliable service to your customers.
Just dig a trench and lay PVC pipe with normal CAT in it, restrict access to MAC addresses of routers you provide to people and there you go. People don't pay, cut off their MAC address. Easy done.
Sure people could spoof their neighbour's MAC address or what-have-you but there's that potential for abuse in any system. But I still think you're going to have an easier time getting clearance to dig trenches than you are dealing with the wireless mess.
It's by being friends with the local politicians.
Internet service is not an open market.
It's a husband and wife outfit that runs a point-to-point wifi network for the
extended neighborhood. We have a little square antenna on a pole on the
roof, a POE power injector inside, then the cable goes into the firewall.
They've been around for a while, so it IS possible, but this is a pretty
dense and well-heeled area, so lots of customers in a small area.
Fire up the spreadsheet and start trying to make the dollars work out.
I work for an ISP that focuses on Rural broadband. There's a reason people don't do this... It's not profitable. We get large subsidies from the feds and still barely make any money at it. The way this works is, you obviously need equipment to service your customers. When using copper to deliver service you have a limited distance you can send your signal. So you'll have a minimal cost for your equipment and then that equipment can only reach customers that are within a certain radius of that equipment. At the bare minimum we're talking about $200,000. Now you've got a density of customers that can be service by that equipment... In a rural town, you'll be very lucky to get 200 customers. We have remotes that have less than 10 people on them. Customers will not pay more than $50 to $100/month for internet service. So do the math... how long will it take you just to pay off the equipment, much less pay for service? Microwave doesn't work. We've tried it. Wide area wifi doesn't work. We've tried it. Fiber works, but costs a fortune and you'd have to dig up your entire town to do it. Your local ISP will also likely sue you. They have exclusivity rights in your town. You might win, but it'll cost you. This is the state of broadband in this country. Other countries deal with it by nationalizing the phone network, but that has its own problems that are arguably even worse.
I once had to interview an applicant for a job on our research group who had done just that during his whole life.
Doing what...? Giving up or learning and doing?
No sig today...
A few years ago there was a wirless ISP in BC that formed it's own co-op. It tried to obtain licencing for the wirless spectrum to increase bandwidth but it was denied by te CRTC because the owners could not be verified to follow CRTC ownership rules.
Maybe OP has different overheads/profit requirements...
No sig today...
Well pros charge for it. So if you want to be a pro, then charge for it. If you give it away then you are not a pro.
Keep in mind the FCC might come after you.
They're overlooking it for a reason and so should OP.
Probably because they don't think that they can deliver acceptable internet with their current profit margins and current prices.
This doesn't mean that someone with less administration and less profit demands can't step in and provide a slightly more expensive service to those who are willing to pay.
From what it sounds like he doesn't even need to provide a good service, he only needs to provide an alternative to another terrible ISP. This will either force the competition to step up and provide a better service or he will become the founder/owner of the best ISP in town. Depending on how much he needs to invest to get to that point it could be a win-win situation, especially if he only have to present the appearance of competition for the other ISP to improve their service.
Y not just make enough buzz and promises to get the local dsl is to boost quality of service. Your community benefits and u can still move forward with plans just in case.
Pretty much. The local government controls access to right of way so you will want them on board. The local chamber is next on your hit parade. You need them to back you because it will help them make more money and bring in more businesses. Next the Economic Development board needs to back you and possibly get you tax breaks and grants.
Do you have a local cable company? If so they will fight you tooth and nail. If not you should at least look at doing TVIP as well as Internet. If you are going to build out then you should make the most of it.
In other words it is a lot of politics these days.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes.
.
Maybe there's a way to use amateur radio instead of wifi for the medium to long hops from your fiber-access to the town and then set up a wifi base station there for the customers. I don't know about the licensing issues with going up over 1-watt transmission though.
as a rural ISP: start with a large one.
Sounds like he wants something ASAP, no dicking around learning, he just wants to do.
1) incorporate to protect yourself. If this goes bad, you don't want it following you for a decade or more; think about alternative models like a co-op
2) talk to your customers. What would they pay, what would they need you to provide, unless they sign something proactively, expect a portion to bail.
3) you need to beat the incumbent by at least 25%, and be repared for retaliation. They have an investment to defend, and they may have a lot more leeway to change than you know (price, upgrading head-end equipment to boost speeds, etc)
3) talk to the provider and negotiate. This is going to be a big fixed expense, and you'll be inning a long term contract typically
4) think outside the box, and focus on need vs what is typical
Before everything, get the support of a bigger, already installed ISP, and ask them all your questions.
In example, in France, there is French Data Network, which is a small ISP (around 1000 users) created in the early 90s, and also, a non-profit organization.
FDN has founded FFDN, which is an association of small local ISPs, and FDN try to bootstrap small/local ISP via FFDN.
The aim is to help them with all kind of administrative issues, and provide them infrastructure level services, so they can reach a critical mass of subscribers before having to do big/long term money investments.
Also, it's clear that FDN and FDN-like ISPs provide only a "best-effort" service (it's not bad at all, but you have no warranty) and it's more expensive than the others ISP. The big plus compared to the others ISP is: net neutrality.
If there is a similar a similar organization in your area, contact them ! ;)
If there are FDN guys here, don't hesitate to correct me
You could have a look at other community broadband projects to get some ideas on organisational and funding models - for example in the UK we have the Rural Broadband Partnership (http://www.ruralbroadband.com) which allows small communities to facilitate broadband in their areas, and they have lots of good pointers and information on their website. Obviously the regulatory stuff won't apply to you but many of the key issues will and it should give you some food for thought.
We have a similar setup blocks from the Capitol Building in DC - not rural or poor, but you can get slow-as-molasses DSL, or comcast cable+Internet that goes out weekly to the extent you need to call their /wonderful/ support services and have technicians dick around and do nothing.
Not that I'm bitter. A local family has cobbled together enough "business-class" connections and shares it over point-to-point wireless: http://www.dcaccess.net/ They're very friendly, and might be willing to help you out on some of the aspects (though your state's regulations are probably much, much different than the District's).
I presume you're mainly doing this for the geek cred of having crazy access to bandwidth. I'd advise you, this being the case, to be willing and financially able to be your only paying customer unless you're going to make this a real full or part time job.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
There is an easy two step plan that you should follow. 1. start a communications club in town and make a pilot project, ie. lay fibre between two peoples homes, they are now the first link. 2. Once the pilot project is done use it as your cause to become mayor. Say to the people "if it cost us X to cable up 2 homes in Y amount of days, we can do it in Z days with AA money". What you in turn might end up with is a municipal backbone, and you get your money back by having ISP's compete for it. If you have a bit of money left over you can even use it yourself for your ISP. I've lived in a town where people did the digging themselves to lay conduit, I don't know where it went but the people thought it enriched them somehow causing them to do digging.
I worked for a WISP for 3 years and I can tell you that most WiFi mesh gear sucks, and it relies on very noisy radio space that is subject to a high noise floor and interference from all kinds of other gear. I'd look into a point-to-multipoint system like Motorola Canopy. You hook up a tower (water towers are especially great, as you can often trade tower access for sharing bandwidth with the municipality) with 6 access points each covering a 60deg area around the tower. Then you "backhaul" the tower using another wireless link to your central office where you have your upstream connection, ideally fiber. As time goes on you grow by adding more towers, increasing your geographical service area, adding more fiber links, eventually doing BGP across the network, etc.
No, you cannot use amateur radio for this, as this would be a commerical service and outside the scope of the Amateur Radio Service. Get an approriate license for your service like cell providers do or otherwise stick to unlicensed spectrum.
He stated that this wasn't meant to be his day job... So he isn't looking to be a Pro at it.
He is opening himself up to a world of hurt. He would need to have a full time job as an ISP owner to keep things running. Even if it is just a one man company. He would be better off getting the Pros to do it. Either working with the local government or a local business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704134 TP-LINK TL-WR702N Wireless N Nano Router They support mesh networking and repeating. Cheap, work great, can be powered by USB or wall wart. Never had one screw up.
Next the Economic Development board needs to back you and possibly get you tax breaks and grants.
Wesley Mouch needs his control, after all.
Get an MBA student to help run the numbers first. If you help contact your local SBA SCORE.
There is a reason nobody has already stepped into this market and I think you have hit on the major issue. If WiFi won't work for you, the only other option is using wire (or fiber) and that is NOT cheap even in high density areas. You *might* be able to engineer a mixed network of wireless and wired, but I dare say it's going to cost a LOT of money up front and the ROI will take years. I seriously doubt that if some existing ISP hasn't snapped up the market, there is anything to be made.
Stay away from this business idea. RUN away as fast as you can.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I want to thank everyone for the advice. I already have a profitable small business, and I understand that this probably will not be profitable. My goal is better internet access for myself and my community. It sounds like I need to go with Ubiquity-type stuff, if anything.
Even if the established provider is simply scared into installing a few more DSLAMs, that would be a good outcome. The best outcome in my mind would be for me to end up leading a community-owned effort.
Noah's Ark was build by an amateur, RMS Titanic - by professionals.
Fantasy story for children vs real life events.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
One of those is likely fictional. You choose.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You've already completed step one, which is to move to someplace rural. Step two is to become an ISP. So basically, you're halfway there.
I knew those Titanic pictures were fake.
Just like they faked those damn moon landings.
I work for a small, rural ISP with many of the same challenges that you're looking at. We started up as a dialup provider in 1997 and have moved into wireless and DSL.
First, get some money. A lot. Shitloads. Second, raise your pain threshold. Third, that whole "this will not be my day job" thing? Forget that, it will be your day job, night job, weekend job and holiday job. Finally, hire some talent that isn't lost in licensed frequencies and other issues.
What we do is wifi mesh. We use grain elevators, radio towers, old TV masts at customers locations, whatever we can ad AP or radio on to help extend the mesh. We use inexpensive customer premise gear, lightning sucks around here. You'll need some backend equipment, bandwidth backhauls and some routing gear; everything we use is open-source, DYI equipment because money, that's why. Don't try to cover the entire area at once, hit customers you can easily reach, solidify them and then move slowly. DO NOT! run an ad that there's a new ISP in town offering high-speed service, you likely won't be able to meet the demand.
A guy, you, can totally do this. But you're going to need some help, some money, and some adjusted expectations. If you're a gambler, go for it, if you're hoping to make a bit of money from it on the side, get out now and save yourself.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
and head back to 1997
Step 1: Buy an urban ISP.
Step 2: Buy a bulldozer.
My webcomic
Step 0: Can you build or own or rent a small cell like tower structure in your district?
Step 1: Map your area for line of sight wireless. How many can you reach with existing Wi Max like units, fixed to a roof with a correct aimed install?
Ho many people own homes in the area vs renters? Any strange local laws, taxes, costly inspections, codes, height issues, tree protection laws... anything that stop a home owner from getting a dish up on their roof.
Step 2: Find out who the isp is in your coverage area.. what do they offer, can you get dedicated backhaul another provider to your tower?
If all that works out you can become a tiny isp with a set of wireless units and eat into any existing provider.
Span the valley with a 'almost free' deal to become a link station into other zones.
A lot of the work has been done with home brew mesh/2nd/3rd world mesh efforts and good hardware and software. The important part is the install - get the consumer dish directed to your tower on the first visit.
You want a dish pointed perfectly at your tower.
Can it work? If your not greedy, can get federal funding, have town hall meetings about the line of sight, mesh options, reality of pricing, ping, weather, install costs... and offer a fair amount of usage per month.
You will be up against a local telco (and an amazing amount enraged well funded "friends of the telco"), a cash strapped local gov, their code enforcers, local laws, taxes, law enforcement, radio users...
On your side you have much lower tech prices, a real need for telco in areas of the USA? with amazing natural beauty totally cut out of big telco coverage.
Think of all the small cafes, summer/winter cabins, hotels, small towns in need for anyone with a vision and some skills.
Go looking for state and federal grants, locals and local radio, tax, ex telco workers. Build a road show and get the community asking questions during meetings.
Start small, get it working, get locals with smiles on their faces in a tiny footprint... then expand. All the best.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.
see http://www.wispa.org/. I use a local WISP in western Iowa - they use grain elevators, water towers, hilltop poles, etc
Steve Cline http://www.clines.org, http://www.objectbap.com
As some who works for an ISP / CLEC, I have to say it's incredibly expensive. Our largest expenses are capital infrastructure build outs and non-stop upgrades. We've got a 50Gb backbone with 100Mb to residential homes. The fee's, regulations, Government paperwork not to mention non-stop harassment from trolls necessitates a rather substantial legal department. There are Federal grants that can get you going in rural areas, but the reason your connectivity sucks is basic economics... the population doesn't support the infrastructure. Peace and quite comes with price. Sorry.
Then seeing what you can get from your immediate neighbors??
even if your neighbors don't have a lot of CASH to pay with you still could get payment in %other stuff% as long as you have enough actual cash to pay your bills with (i would say a freezer full of Critter would be good payment for a few months of net access).
but yes it would be a very good idea to have a lawyer involved with this just to keep the various Wolves in line.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Noah's Ark is fiction and the Titanic ran into an iceberg - what is your point?
Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP? I have considered WiFi mesh networking, and even running wires on the power/telephone polls, but the required licensing and other issues are foreign to me. What would you do?"
Dear hawkeye,
Please consider following RFCs relevant for your situation: RFC 1149, RFC 6217, and don't forget RFC 6214 because the Internet is switching over to IPv6.
There is probably a very good reason the Pros are overlooking his town/community. When he starts trying to string cable, I suspect he'll find that out.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
That's great that you've got likely several hundred strands of fiber running by your house. Now... if there was a point of presence (POP) behind your house where the fiber came in, went into a fiber switch/booster then things would be a bit more interesting. However since you haven't indicated this, here's what would have to happen.
The company that owns the fiber is going to have to come out, build a little building, dig up the fiber, then cut the fiber, then re-terminate the fiber, put in a couple of bad ass fiber switches, etc. All this stuff also needs power, emergency power, cooling, etc. Then from there, they things get more complicated.
Quite likely they're going to put another switch out there where they can meter the bandwidth going in/out. You'll need some real routing gear to use that connection (since they'll probably dump you out an OC192)
Since you've pointed out that this is rural, meshing is going to only possibly work in a neighborhood and our experiences with large scale meshing have been meh at best since at certain points you'll have all the traffic being funneled through some edge nodes.
So, you're going to have to run (possibly more fibre) to establish your own POP's throughout the community. You'll want to put one down town so you can provide high speed access to businesses, the schools and the town government. Depending on the density of the downtown area you could put in a DSLam and provide high speed DSL to the businesses. Depending on the business that might want more speed so you'll need to provide for bigger/better pipes.
Rural customers are a whole other flustercluck.
Through all of this we haven't even talked about the cost involved. Before you hook your first paying customer up, we're talking about several 100k. Firstly, that building that the telecom company has to build behind your house... they're going to want to defray the cost of that. Those other pops that you need to deploy... you're going to need space, cooling, equipment, power, etc. You're going to need a couple of good network engineers who know what the hell they're doing.
Is it impossible? No. It's totally doable. Expensive, yeah. ROI? At least a couple of years.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I did the local WISP thing... and as expected customers thought that wireless meant that they had a direct line to 24/7 support. 2200+ dial up and about 20 WISP accounts. Guess what group called the most?
I kinda enjoyed telling them to read the service agreement... as it CLEARLY spelled out what I had to do. If they cancelled (rarely) then my life got easier. Plus if it was after the 30 day refund period I got to keep the setup fee and free gear they had to buy. The key to a successful install is a thorough site survey. You did the standard RF signal check, LOS check, but also look at the PC... lots of games? Fake a reason or just tell them no. A gamer is 10000% more likely to be a PITA then a casual surfer. Business people were hard to tell... most just needed a VPN to their corporate servers, others wanted full video chat. So if there was a web cam I'd ask if they needed video chat a lot. If they did I wouldn't sign them up.
Bottom line: CHERRY PICK YOUR CUSTOMERS. Its easier to not do an install that it is to try and make them happy for the $30 a month you will get for being miserable. Only time I would consider taking on a 'problem child' is if I billed them for support. Ie if I can ping CPE then my side is good. Dispatch is $50 per hour or partial and starts when the truck rolls.
My most favorite business quote: MAKE MONEY, NOT FRIENDS.
I have been there brother, I have been there. Don't do it.
We moved to a rural town south of Houston in 1999. When all my buddies were getting broadband (DSL had been around a while, cable modems were pretty new), I was stuck with dial up. And this was crappy dial-up. 56K was the norm at the time, but at best I could get 28.8K. For days after a rain only 19.6K or worse. I swear I could hear individual bits going back and forth. After years of this, I went nuts.
I took an aerial photo of my neighborhood, went to each house to determine what sort of line-of-sight to my property could be had. Texas near Houston is pretty flat, but houses were on 2 to 15 acre tracts, so the houses were spread pretty thin. By the way, when you drive slowly and stop in front of each house, people get pretty suspicious. Lots of evil-eyes were turned my way, and I guessing a muzzle or two as well.
I did a lot of leg work, and then met with some people who specialize in rural internet. They came down, we met, they looks at a couple of the radio/TV masts close by, and they went back to "crunch the numbers". I never heard from them again.
Plan two was to put up a small tower on my property and distribute T1 via wireless. I bought some expensive non-line-of-sight equipment (Proxim Tsunami) for testing. I then needed to figure out how tall a tower I would need (we had 12 acres of gorgeous live oak trees) for the antenna. The answer: helium.
For the record, a garbage bag (the really cheap, thin, light-weight ones) filled with helium can lift about a quarter of a pound. Also, they have what I call a "half-lift" of 2 days, after which they can only lift half as much. A single bottle of helium can fill about 32 of these garbage bags. It took all 32 bags to lift the antenna and receiver, tethered by CAT5 cable on a garden hose reel. Boy I was nervous, there was a lot of money attached to that.
While it was good fun at the time, looking back it is better just to suffer. I remember after all that going door-to-door to find out who would be interested, there just wasn't any. At all. Maybe one. Everybody was content with pokey dial-up. The abject indifference to connection speed in the rural area was a crushing disappointment.
soon after, I saw a utility truck with line men attaching a shiny new black fiber-optic cable right past my neighborhood. I that night I followed it probably 50 miles toward Victoria, TX to try and find the owner (the line men were contractors and did not know). No dice. A week later they dropped a terminal box about a mile north of my house, and it had a nice sticker with a phone number.
I traced that to a local cable provider, who had a cable internet service. Plan 3: I offered them $7000 to bring cable internet service to my house (which would have been much cheaper than the other alternatives). No.
Plan 4: Houston was hosting the Super Bowl that year. Harpoon the Goodyear blimp, drag it home, paint it sky blue, and use that for my antenna platform. No one would notice.
About a year or two after all this started, SWBT put in a remote terminal three blocks away. A year after that a cable company who bought the other cable company brought cable internet service.
Between the effort, the cost, and the supreme indifference of your neighbors, it just is not worth it. Some parts were fun. Most parts were costly. I still look at cell-phone towers and radio/TV masts with envy. You do not appreciate them until you really want one.
On the other hand, I have some lightly used Proxim Tsunami equipment in the attic for sale....
I waited - approx 12 years before I got an ADSL service. I think you should sell up and move.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Noah's Ark benefited from divine intervention, Titanic suffered from security-as-a-feature idiots.
I launched a rural ISP in France, mostly because I needed broadband myself.
Basically you need to understand that there are three levels:
a) It's you and a couple of close neighboor and friends who are not too picky, and you really need it, so go for it, it's an interesting learning experience.
b) It starts to get "real" clients that actually really expect services, you'll start loosing money, sleep and health...
c) It starts to get enough clients to make it worth your while, the local operator will jump in and use their capacity to leverage their network, political clout, and infrastructure to destroy your business...
In conclusion only do it if on of these apply
a) it's real small and there is no other way.
b) it's a little bit bigger but you have lots of similar friends who will help duplicate your efforts
c) you're a rural bilionaire and need/want the "goodwill"
Technically wifi mesh with the current technologies do not work that well in rural areas, and you need to manage the access to "private or public" land to put your relays and you might need an insurance so that if an antena falls on somebody's head you do not get ruined...
In france it helps that either the church or the town hall it among the highest buildings in the villages, so if you get either of the "landlords" to agree you have a good central relay...
In your situation it might be very different, moreover although it is in theory possible to use wifi over very long distance and still be within "legal transmission power limits" you need the right kind of antennas, connecting individual farms might imply: a) lots of material, b) finding places to put relays if you do not have line of sight, and a strong wind can force you to realign your antenas...
Moreover most potential client will think that you are a abusing your "monopoly" powers because you charge them a reasonable price covering the cost of
a home router, a pair of directional antenas, a % of your infrastructure + a % of your fiber or satelite link... and need to absorb these price in less than 18 month, because there is no way you can be sure that the local telco will not roll out a wimax platform and throw you out.
This implies a total much higher than what it cost in a large city and what the tv ad they just saw says...
(of course you could try to roll out a wimax also, but it is way more expensive and has probably much more regulatory impact, at least in europe it does).
And "how come you are not offering TV on your "crapy expensive broadband connexion ?"...
So in final conclusion, unless you do if for fun or for "political" reasons, you'll probably will find it much "cheaper" to use a satelite connection...
Good luck :-)
There's nothing else to say. If you want to save yourself a world of pain, don't get involved.
Take a time machine back to 1994.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
OK, it's a lame post, but he's got a point. The guy doesn't want to quit his day job, but he wants to start a business that what will take a lot of work to get up and running. Finding money, buying hardware, designing infrastructure and systems, billing and supporting customers. The notion that he can do all this in his spare time is purely amateur thinking.
It is understandable that in small communities enterpirses like this are hard to get started and even harder to maintain. I would get some local folks involved to assist, specifically any Jr/Sr High School students. An impromptu group of folks can do a lot of work with miminal time, resources, and money. The example I have heard of is this: The Fab-Fi project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi and http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/ This project is working in many rura/mountainous areas very well. They have recommended diagrams, 'case studies', and plans available free from the organization. This along witht eh 501 grants mentioned will help provide a community-based system that will provide the service but also involvment and educational opportunities for the area.
Become a Wireless Internet Service Provider. Very little to no licensing and relatively cheap to get started. For cheap you'll want Ubiquiti (http://www.ubnt.com/), for reliable [but more expensive] you'll want http://www.cambiumnetworks.com/. If you need help/have questions, a good place to go is http://www.afmug.com/ and join the mailing list. They'll be more than happy to help you get started.
I worked at a wireless ISP that serviced roughly 200 customers that were completely unreachable by traditional means. The location was set in the mild to medium forested areas of East Texas. We had a 30Mb pipe that worked quite well for our network we never saw it start to "peak" or be overtaxed. Being that we were on the 900Mhz spectrum, the fastest anyone could run at was 1.5Mb/s - 2Mb/s.
Here area some of my thoughts regarding setting up your own ISP.
1) It is completely doable. However, there are two roads to take. You can do it on the cheap, or you can do it the way that will stand time. My company chose the method that stood throughout time. What I mean is, we were not using off-the-shelf radios. We rolled out the network using the 900Mhz Motorola Canopy equipment. We used outdoor rated cable that had separation of twisted pairs and grease filled interior to prevent water issues.
Our main competitor, who worked on the north and west side of the city went the opposite route. He chose to use cheaper 2.4GHZ equipment, primarily PTP bridges.
2) The technology is out there, you just have to find it at a price that you are willing to pay. When I was servicing the radios, they would cost roughly $350 new from Motorola just for the endpoint Subscriber Module. We instead purchased refurbished models for almost half the price at $200-225. The Access points and other major equipment will set you back, IT IS NOT CHEAP.
3) Backbone and network structure. We may have over engineered our network, but we felt it was necessary to keep subscriber information private. We had a small cisco switch that at each access tower that would assign VLAN to each subscriber module. On the internal side of the switch, the VLANs were removed and went into a bulk VLAN that was specified for that tower. No other subscriber could see any other one without first going to "The Internet". We also created a Management VLAN, so we could service and access the management interfaces on each of the Backhauls and APs. Latency across the network averaged about 50-150ms.
4) Please for the love of all that is holy, do not, run your own Email server. It is a absolute pain in the ass. I was the person who was in charge of ensuring that the systems in place stayed running. This meant, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, Email Services, and Management interfaces.
Remember Virtual Machines are your friend. Buy one or two hefty servers and backup the VMs to each other. That way if you have an outtage, you can get the VMs back up in running in about an hour.
DHCP - Since we had a bit of a robust network, we had different subnets for each of our towers. In total we had about 18 subnets that each had different purposes. This tool helped like the charm that it was. http://phpdhcpadmin.sourceforge.net/ At the time the logout system was broken, however, I patched the code to disable the login/logout functions and wrote a script that would automatically give me the next available IP address.
DNS - No fancy tools here, I mostly just let it roll and didn't touch it. I only touched DHCP when we added a hosted website.(which later went to rackspace)
HTTP - Simple, run Apache, set and forget.
Email Services - Complete Pain In The Ass. No really, I'm not joking. At the time, the powers over me, decided that we would give our customers up to 5 email addresses. So I setup a linux server in that ran Postfix, Dovecot, ClamAV, Squirrel Mail. It provided IMAP, POP, SMTP and SSL(if wanted). At the time, when I arrived the server was already in place and running. However, fast forward, 3 months, and someone decided to run "updates" on the server. Breaks all of the packages, settings, the whole shebang. Not a fun week at all.
Besides that, there were also issue with SPAM. We would constantly get blacklisted by various servers.
Management Interfaces - This was where the heart of out network lay. I have one word, Cacti, http://cacti.net/ For wireles
I was an ISP for 10 years in a Rural area with 40sq miles of wifi coverage. It was nothing but headache. Licenced is the only way to go if looking at wireless. Putting fiber to the home is the only real solution, but is not going to fit in your budget. There is no profit to be made and only headaches to be gained. I still own part of a fiber optic company now if that tells you anything. Best thing to do is see if you can get Verizon to put a tower close by and use LTE.
Of course their fake I saw Leonardo DiCarprio in movies that came out years later. His death was a hoax.
God: "I'm not a genocidal maniac I'll let at least 2 of you live."
Rather than go the 'official' route, I'd recommend doing a community thing.
You can get relatively inexpensive, outdoor rated WiFi repeaters like the Wirie. It has a 1 watt transmitter and a 0.5 watt local transmitter. Run the high speed fiber to your house, sprinkle these around the neighborhood, and you're good to go.Change the WEP password once a month and email it out to all the 'paying' customers, to block people not willing to pay. Make the purchase of the equipment (which has to do with signal quality) the obligation of the end customer. Just put the first one high up on a pole near your house and let all your neighbors know you're open for business.
You need to consider and interlocking series of mesh network transponders that your subscribers would pay to rent. That way, you can boucne the signal to them across wide swaths of land without line of site. No need to satellites or other expensive solutions.
Think about it.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
"Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP?"
So.. you aren't going to put much time into it, your customers won't spend much money on it, but you've got the worst possible geography *AND* to top it off you don't even know how an ISP works.
Seriously? WTF are you thinking?
Take a clue from all the other people that don't offer broadband in your area.
-Lod
WiMAX?
Over the years, various people exploring the idea of spreading wireless internet in my home town approached my parents about using their ham radio tower. Their tower was in a bad location (large spruce trees in most directions). Other people's towers were better.
I am by far NOT a techie, but WiMax was the technology. I don't know if Bridgemaxx is still around, but they are/were the WiMax provider. Their end units were made by Alvarion.
Anyway, they typically brought service to rural areas. Perhaps asking them to be the provider might work. It's been a while since I met them (I was a news producer at the time), but their lead engineers are very nice people, and may let you pick their brain a little.
Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP?
This *will* have to be your day job. Tech support alone will eat up many hours in a day, plus swapping out hardware, dealing with billing issues etc. Being a rural ISP is not a part-time thing. Frankly, if the local populace is able to get DSL that is fast enough for them to watch Gangnam Style on YouTube I'd leave it at that.
actually 8. Noah Ham Shem And Japeth plus all of their wives
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Shut up or be he'll smite you.
fail to fixa customer's internet in two hours and you've lost then
You had me up to this point. I can tell you from experience that if you're a small ISP bringing the world to the farmer's living room, people are pretty darned understanding. As long as they can see that you're doing everything you can, that you're not an idiot, and that you do actually care that their internet works, they'll back you 100%.
Where does using oxen to lay down fiber lines come in? :)
Everyone believed it because they wanted it to be true.
Google on "how to start an ISP"
Google on "how to write an ISP business plan"
Google on "ISP liabilities"
???
Tell that to the Elephants. Monkeys. Rats. etc.
I think the answer is pretty clear. Put a flag pole or antenna mast up next to your house, install a good outdoor WiFi AP on top of it, connect it to your DSL service (however terrible it may be), and shut off encryption so your neighbors can connect to and use it at will. Get together with other techies in your town, and convince them to do the same. Suddenly, a good number of those poor rural people are connected to the internet, at a price they can afford.
It's clear the economics aren't there to make a business out of it, and you apparently don't have the chops for it, anyhow, so setting up a few open APs around town will probably provide the most benefit, with the least cost and effort on your part.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Look at unlicensed wireless to start. Routerboard equipment etc. Lease antenna space on a tower, "beam" from your POP to it, point customer's antenna's at tower... all is good.
See http://www.mric.net/ This is a rural wireless internet coop in a hilly/mountainous region that is heavily wooded. They were set up 10 years ago and have over 500 members.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Licensing aside, No encrypted traffic, no 'business use' (so much for amazon...), ID requirements, and the fact that most ham data tech is SUPER slow (2400baud for most of it).
You're better off just using directional antennas on regular wifi gear for short range (a few miles), or dropping down to 1.2ghz stuff for the longer haul links. All commercial.
I used to live in the country, 7 miles to the local CO. We used a successful rural WiFi provider, Zetta Broadband. My kids still use them, $55 a month. They started out small and have expanded successfully. They do not use public right of ways. The poles are in the wrong places and there is all the legal mumbo jumbo. Instead they look at the local topography and approach the landowners of the high points. I believe they offer a free local Internet connection in return for siting a tower on their property. As I recall they will have a land line connection to a base station for an area and then hub and spoke repeaters as the demand succeeds.
The other thing they did was to get subscribers to put Zetta Broadband signs at the end of their driveways. You might offer a months free service for the lessor roads. On the main roads you might offer a significant discount. The signs were small 1' x 2' on wire H frame stakes. I know I decided to use Zetta because I saw their signs several times a week as I drove by. I eventually stopped and took down their information.
Caution: getting started is expensive, you probably need at least one commercial base station. You might be able to modify home WiFi units to act as repeaters but you will need some sort of tower or mast, antennas, weather proof enclosures, and possibly trenching from the house to the tower for power at least. Home WiFi units are a short term solution at best.
Customers also need an out-door directional POE WiFi unit. As I recall, Zetta charges $130- $150 to install it including the unit and they require a Zetta install. The one trick I saw was using a telescoping pole with a WiFi unit on it so they could measure the power and direction to choose the antenna location on the house.
You might start small with a collective. Find 5 - 10 neighbors who would be willing to buy the directional WiFi unit and pay you a monthly fee. Make sure these people's property makes sense in terms of line of site. The telescoping pole might be a good demo to convince people to chip in. Put the pole up and watch a NetFlix video on your laptop.
To get a fiber drop to your house check with the regulatory agencies if they have starter or seed programs. I know there is money collected for rural Internet. Figure out how to tap into it on a small scale.
Go full bore on this. There is a real need for rural Internet. Satellite and dial-up suck and if you are in the country DSL is not even a distant thought. If you are successful getting started word of mouth will spread.
This is precisely why the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative exists.
http://nrtc.coop/
Propose it as a project to provide low-cost Internet to your community to the town. Get as many residents on board ahead of time as possible so that the people feel like they're members of an Internet co-op rather than customers. You can get a lot of mileage out of dissatisfaction with an existing provider.
take a look at http://villagetelco.org/
Actually, if you're the only game in town for rural connections outside of satellite, you can even be an idiot. I speak from the experience of knowing one such who ran a rural WISP.
First assemble your ingredients:
2 Pentium-90 PCs running BSD
1 Livingston Portmaster
30 28.8k US Robotics modems
1 256k Frame Relay connection to UUNet via your local telephone company
1 PRI trunk also from your local telephone company
1000 floppy disks loaded with Trumpet Winsock and WS-FTP
3 college students
Assorted branded swag from your local corporate accessory supplier
Take all your mechanical ingredients and one of the college students. Combine in a concrete box zoned for light industrial or commercial use. Add the other two college students when the first one begins sleeping in the concrete box. Allow to simmer until the packets start flowing without interruption. Sprinkle the swag liberally across your local community and serve.
This ISP recipie serves approximately 300 users, though if you're willing to piss off a few people you can probably stretch it to 500. This recipie can be doubled easily, but beyond that you may need to adjust the amounts or possibly add a Webmaster. I've had this recipie since 1994 and it was a big hit back then. Enjoy!
...and the old saw about racing comes to mind:
How do you make a small fortune in rural broadband?
Start with a large fortune.
Unless you're going to do it to make a profit, just carefully consider the aphorism "no good deed goes unpunished."
They were pretty much in the same boat as the poster. Send them an email with the question.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Step 1: Buy a small Mikrotik Routerboard.
Step 2: Work with it until you learn enough to set up the networking stuff - DHCP, VLANS, QoS, etc.
Step 3: Then buy two of their point to point bridges.
Step 4: See step 2.
Step 5: Scale up to two houses.
Step 6: See step 2.
And so on.
Also, look into The Dude. It's fantastic software. And free.
I agree! Everyone should give up on doing hard things!
Rural, with limited ISP availability already, likely means that many potential customers don't have computers, and certainly aren't used to dealing with things like virus problems, being inundated with advertisements, and slow computers with bloatware. Think of all the computer problems your close relatives have approached you with in the last 5 years. Now expand that figure to represent your potential customer base. As a one-man ISP, are you prepared to deal with the volume of support requests? In a small community, there's a level of expectation that goes beyond the grey area of "no, that's a problem on your computer, not with your internet service" that larger ISPs manage to pull off. Are you prepared to draw lines (and throw a rift between you and your country bumpkin customers) or to invest the time demanded by not drawing them?
Your best bet for a WISP (become a Virtual ISP) is find a re-seller that you can wholesale wireless with to make some money in bigger areas and then come back and find someone to split the costs later and put in a wireless back haul. In other words, you might not be able to serve them now, but in the future you can split the cost with someone and earn a decent living.
A Place can sit without broadband for teen years then get the best internet in the country within weeks of a small ISP having completed their new installation.
I didn't have Internet access for any of my teen years; it wasn't until I was over fifty that mere mortals could get Internet access.
Lots of good people belong to WISPA, and you should get as much expertise behind you as possible. These guys have went through the process, and can keep you from making the mistakes they already did. Great organization, and a good email list for help.
Just to expand on "incorporate to protect yourself"... look up "piercing the corporate veil". Be very careful to not commingle personal and corporate assets, or do any of the other things that can cost you your liability protection.
Treat is as a real, separate, independent business. And if you don't know how to do that, hire a good accountant.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
There are some things you can do as a part time job. I am skeptical that this is one of them.
....at Wireless Ypsi, which is a successful community-based mesh network here in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It uses the Meraki network technology; here is Wireless Ypsi's page on the Meraki site.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.