DOs and DONTs for small ISP

Mon Jun 3 18:55:25 UTC 2019

I would respectfully point out that my point about the importance of
finding the right partners. For you, sounds like it was good to have
opportunity to get out of this venture.

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 2:40 PM Warren Kumari <warren at kumari.net> wrote:

> 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
>

-- 
Fletcher Kittredge
GWI
207-602-1134
www.gwi.net
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