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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.
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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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.
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.
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?
Answer sense no makes your
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe OP has different overheads/profit requirements...
No sig today...
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.
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
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
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.
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 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
English not being the official language means when I was in Arizona I could go to the polling place and ask for a ballot in Navajo and they were required to provide it.
It also means that anyone that goes into a government building can request a translator for whatever language they choose to speak and the government office is required to provide it. This can be anything from Spanish, Russian to obscure African dialects that are only spoken by a few people. I am not sure what the reaction to Klingon would be, so I wouldn't recommend it.
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.
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
Of course their fake I saw Leonardo DiCarprio in movies that came out years later. His death was a hoax.
"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
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%.
Everyone believed it because they wanted it to be true.
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
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.