Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

Not sure if it’s what the person in question did, but there’s a whole guide that pops up on here occasionally regarding building a wireless ISP.

https://startyourownisp.com/

I can't find any section of that guide that talks about peering or whatever ISPs are supposed to do to connect to the broader internet. Do you see any step that explains this?

It's the 2nd step

https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/

If you just Google then it's usually called leased or dedicated internet

Just some (US) examples

https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-internet...

https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-intern...

https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-...

From https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/, doesn't this site basically say connect to another ISP?

So they're leasing ("buying"?) fiber from the same ISPs they're trying to displace and relying on that payment to provide them with continued internet access? This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP, but something akin to an MVNO where they're at the mercy of the same companies they're competing with. I get the initial sale might seem fine, and the established ISPs might be fine with this as long as the company is small, but why wouldn't these companies shut them off (or raise the prices, etc.) when they grow too big to become dangerous?

As a small ISP you don't peer - you just buy transit from a bigger ISP. So the basic steps are:

1. Buy a 1G/1G or 10G/10G whatever link to a building you own.

2. Resell that link in parts to customers.

Or you can get yourself into a POP (point of presence) somewhere that multiple providers are also in, and get transit that way. Depends on where you are and what you can get access to.

You can lease fibre/lambda/L2 transport to an IXP (and there peer with other local ISPs and get global transit from Tier 1 providers) from many companies that don't even have any residential offering.

Or if (technically/financially/legally) possible, even run your own fibre to a PoP housing an IXP on your own.

Once you're in multiple PoPs and on multiple IXPs and with multiple upstreams/peers you're pretty much independent from the whims of a single ISP.

Because it's all business to them, and if they did it overtly they could get sued.

But also because once you're in a single location, you can pretty easily get multiple providers to that location for a Price, so there's really no point. Even small rural towns usually have multiple internet connections from different companies, and if they don't you can pay to run fiber if you really wanted to.

People find it hard to believe, but Comcast et al are actually businesses, not Satan's marketing department; and they happily take money even from "competitors".

Well there three tiers of ISPs, each one buying service from the one above them. It's ISPs all the way down, and the higher up you go the more expensive the hardware to run it gets.

>This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP

I'm not an expert but afaik you can't just be a Tier 1 network member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

Even Tier 2 very limited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network

In this guide's case yes you will be akin to an MVNO, you won't peer but just buying transit traffic. That's why most of these guides are also focusing on making the network wireless only (easier to build infrastructure)

Because there are different business units in the upstream company handling the dedicated access vs consumer sides. The dedicated business side have their own sales goals and if you compete with the consumer side, that’s not a problem for them. I’m sure there are some regulatory/anti competitive measures at play here too, but economically, the two sides of the business will act more or less independently.

At the T1 level it's more completely a mesh type setup, but even lower tier ISPs might set up peering agreements to bypass their main higher tier ISP where it makes sense for cost or service quality reasons. Or refuse to to extract more money as in the comcast vs level1 disputes over netflix traffic a while back

As a small ISP you definitely can peer and many do, you just aren’t going to get settlement-free peering with any of the big eyeball networks like Comcast.

Something like Seattle IX is a good example of where lots of peering sessions could be established (although I haven’t looked at Jared’s ASN in any detail to see where it’s present).

https://www.seattleix.net/home

Any traffic you’re able to offload via peering you wouldn’t be paying an IP transit to haul, so it’s worth seeing if networks like Netflix are on the Route Servers (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/ams-ix-route-server...) at any IX nearby your network, seeing if you can negotiate a session over the IX even if they don’t participate in the RS, or seeing if you can do PNI (sling a cable between your networks in a facility you’re both located in).

Edit: Jared’s on Detroit IX. https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20268

I feel like this could be made into an ISP Tycoon game.

Yes, it can be pretty simple. Back in the day when DSL and comcast were the options and all of the connections were things like UP TO 5 or even 20 Mbps, but speeds were rarely that - I paid for a dedicated 2Mbs up and down ($180/month) with no restrictions on use and started sharing/reselling it to others in my apartment building, not with wireless, but with cat5 out the window, up the gutter, back inside, etc. Across the parking lot another guy was sharing his comcast with another building - but comcast was starting to be so slow they couldn't use it. We merged our empires by stringing some cat 5 across the parking lot, around a pole and to his place. Later we added more nearby buildings, all wired until we had 5 buildings and about 20 "subscribers". Even with 2Mbps, everyone on the network was happier with a guaranteed speed than their flaky "up to" speeds they used to have. Did I run an ISP? I had subscribers, had to maintain a network, had a proxy server to reduce requests out of the network, had to deal with abuse and collect money - so I'd say yes, a small one, but yes.

To expand on that:

Comcast would much rather sell a dedicated fiber to a business with capital and guarantees.

Selling to the individual consumer doesn't make a lot of sense business-wise, because of the deployment costs and continued support costs.

Comcast is also abusing their status as oligopoly to gouge costumers financially and qos-wise, but if they're selling to a business that buys large quantities and has staff who's job it is to handle network problems, they actually like that (right up until that business threatens to compete with them in areas where said oligopoly is in place, of course)

It actually does exist lol! Made by Cisco as an e-learning tool

Gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foa34qoRzjs

https://web.archive.org/web/20150317144142/https://cisco.edu...

He's not trying to displace the majors. In rural areas, owning and maintaining a bunch of fiber to service less than a thousand customers isn't a business Comcast really wants to be in unless they get paid a ton for it.

Dang, as someone that enjoys Tycoons, Tactics, and Management Simulators, this really sounds fun.

Out of curiosity did you do things above board from a business standpoint (taxes etc.) or was this more of a blackmarket setup?

You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources. It's like saying that if you build a gas station and buy your gas from Exxon then that's bad because Exxon also operates gas stations. It's not like an MVNO where all you're doing is sending the customer a bill, and provisioning API requests to Verizon.

> You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources.

The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen. It's not like the executives are oblivious to how much money each unit is making and whether another unit could make more in place of it. If you're the CEO and see you could charge twice as much by doing retail instead of wholesale then you'd obviously try to do that.

Rather, the explanations I'm getting from the other comments seems to be that (a) regulators require some kind of reasonable wholesale to exist to third parties, (b) the big ISPs aren't planning to serve those markets anyway, so they're not missing out on any income by taking money from the last-mile ISPs. And as long as those last-mile ISPs don't try to compete for the same customers then they're fine.

You definitely can (and should) peer as a small ISP, even if you are buying transit from other providers. This is especially true if you're running an MPLS headend as you'll still have choke points at L2 circuits in your own network. Owning your own peering can be a great way to offload traffic to other circuits that share destinations, most commonly traffic destined for VOD/streaming CDNs.

(N.B. — This is what has worked well for the WISP I cofounded, but YMMV depending on headend infra).

Oh god, it seems to essentially be packet tracer under the hood. It's a great tool, but I HATED using it in school.

Wait. The poster above said in point 1 to buy a line,1G, 10g depending on your upstream seller. Why do you need peering then?

If I have 1Gbps line for example and 10 users each are using equal amount 100% of time, it shouldn't matter they send the data to Alaska or Russia or Australia ? Or does it?

Do you buy the pipe and the data itself also?

> Any traffic you’re able to offload via peering you wouldn’t be paying an IP transit to haul

When you're small enough, the difference in price between transit and what it takes to get you to an IX is likely to be pretty small. But, you probably want to be at an IX sooner or later anyway (easier to get multiple transit offers at an IX than on the side of the road), so might as well peer while you're there.

> The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen.

Then you've not worked in large B2B companies before. Eg Apple pays Google money and Google pays money to Apple, any perceived public rivalry goes out the window as far as business between the two is concerned.

If you're the CEO of Comcast, you've never even heard of this small time ISP, you have far bigger things to spend your time on, and the "upstream" business unit of Comcast really doesn't care what you're doing, so long as your money's green. It's all business. See also: Netflix using AWS despite Amazon having a streaming video service of their own.

gns3 perhaps? I haven't had that setup for a while but I loved it. I had my whole small ISP in it at some point to work as a test/lab env for testing things out. It's a trick to get going but was kinda fun. I took a copy of that when I left and every now and then I fire it up and mess around with my old dsl/dialup ISP from back in the day.

If you want to try your hand in a playground for the software (routing) parts, DN42[1] is essentially one.

[1] https://dn42.us/, https://dn42.eu/, https://dn42.dev/

You don't "need" peering but it offloads your upstream (transit) links, which are generally much more expensive. In the old days, I worked for couple ISPs and we typically had 3 or 4 upstreams (generally UUNet, Sprint, MCI...) This was back when a T1 was still considered fast.

Who is T1, T2 and T3? I really don't see it. Seems like that tiering has aged about as well as the OSI model.

Taxes? I was a college student, so I didn't make enough to owe any taxes, but it was mostly cash. I wouldn't have done it if I had to hop through the business hoops.