DOs and DONTs for small ISP

Mon Jun 3 19:12:01 UTC 2019

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 2:55 PM Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred at gwi.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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.

Oh, goodness yes -- however, I *still* have barely working Internet
access at that location (it's basically a weekend home) -- I've
somewhat started down the Jared Mauch "buy used vibratory plow, trench
(house is off a dirt road, neighbors won't have an issue with right of
way if I provide them free bits!), install fiber" path. My driveway is
@1/4 mile, the dirt road is 0.6 miles and at the end of the road there
is (what used to be) Quest fiber. Unfortunately the fiber was
originally run for Mount Weather
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operations_Center)
and no-one I've asked seems to know who controls it now, and or swears
that it doesn't exist (although the local Miss Utility / VA811 will
come mark it if you call).

Some dark nights, when trying to use the network while everyone is
using NetFlix, and the RTT for my SSH sessions starts exceeding
1,500ms I strongly consider walking to the end of the road with a
nice, sharp shovel, and then talking to the splicers when they come
repair the damage :-)

W

>
> 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

-- 
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