DOs and DONTs for small ISP

Warren Kumari warren at kumari.net
Mon Jun 3 18:39:56 UTC 2019


On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 1:09 PM Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred at gwi.net> wrote:
>
>
> Here is your checklist in descending order of importance:
>
> market opportunity
> finding the right partners (see below)
> financial
> sales and marketing
> organizational capacity and HR
> legal, regulatory
> capital acquisition
> security
> ...
> ...
> ...
> technical including equipment selection, routing policy, filtering, etc
>
> It is a stone cold lock that the success of your new ISP will governed by factors other than technical. Your most important task is to find competent  financial and marketing people you can respect and trust. If the market opportunity exists and you find them, you will succeed. If you don't, all the technical excellence in the world won't help you. The road is littered with technically excellent companies that failed.

Indeed, but you *also* need to have some technical clue. Two or three
years ago a friend and I tried to start a local wireless ISP -- I was
doing this purely as a "My home Internet access sucks, and I'll
happily donate time, equipment, IP space and some startup capital to
fix this" play -- unfortunately it turns out that he and I had very
different ideas on, well, basically everything. I wanted an actual
architecture / design, and diagrams and routin' and such. He was much
more of "We don't need a list of IPs, if I ping it and can't reach it
it must be free" / "routing is too hard, let's just put it all in a
switch and... um... NAT!". I wanted a plan, and was willing to put in
the time and effort to build Ansible / Puppet / an NMS / AAA, etc, he
was more seat-of-the-pants.

But yes, even if we had good technology this would have failed - there
was no real business plan (other than "The current provider is really
bad, if we build something else, people will be breaking down the door
to sign up"), no real marketing plan (see previous), etc.

He was also a bit of a gun nut, and so would arrive at customers with
a (holstered) firearm belted on -- even in Virginia this was not a
winning business move.

Starting a successful ISP is this day and age is hard - make sure
that, if you do it, you and whoever you are doing this with are
compatible, are both committed, and have similar views on things...

W


>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 8:05 AM Mehmet Akcin <mehmet at akcin.net> wrote:
>>
>> hi there,
>>
>> I know there are folks from lots of small ISPs here and I wanted to check-in on asking few advice points as I am involved building an ISP from green-field.
>>
>> Usually, it's pretty straight forward to cover high-level important things, filters, routing policies, etc.but we all know the devil is in the details.
>>
>> I am putting together a public DOs and DONTs blog post and would love to hear from those who have built ISPs and have recommendations from Billing to Interconnection, Routing policy to Out of the band  & console setup, Software recommendations, etc. Bottom line is that I would like to publish a checklist with these recommendations which I hope will be useful for all.
>>
>> thanks in advance for your help and recommendation.
>>
>> Mehmet
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Fletcher Kittredge
> GWI
> 207-602-1134
> www.gwi.net



-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf



More information about the NANOG mailing list