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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 1 comments | 10 Aug 22 13:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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samwhiteUK ◴[10 Aug 22 13:45 UTC] No.32411821[source]▶
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?
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the_only_law ◴[10 Aug 22 13:47 UTC] No.32411847[source]▶
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/

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dataflow ◴[10 Aug 22 13:57 UTC] No.32412013[source]▶
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?
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bombcar ◴[10 Aug 22 14:06 UTC] No.32412178[source]▶
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.

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1. spmurrayzzz ◴[10 Aug 22 16:20 UTC] No.32414505{3}[source]▶
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).