How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
I legit wish I had known about you a few years ago when writing my thesis. It was about community run broadband internet. I was trying to identify repeatable models for communities who wanted to run their own ISPs to use. This would have been so helpful!
Side note, truly inspirational an something I would love to do in my little village in Ohio.
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking more about your thesis? I am interested in rural internet as well for Native American reservations and both opie's and your comments are inspiring and something I definitely want to read.
I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.
I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).
I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.
Year 1: $52/mo Year 2: $74/mo Year 3: $98/mo
I have made no changes to my account.
This is why we need choices for ISP's.
Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.
We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
That's a beautiful thing.
https://startyourownisp.com/
Useful threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
how can I do this for my city?
Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
Do you operate it as a nonprofit? Seems like you could be at least seeing some tax benefits probably