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

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.

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