I'm going to put my hand up and say I have absolutely no idea how an ISP works. He runs cables to each house in the area... now where does the other end go?
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?
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.
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.