How to create an ISP?
 

Did you stare blankely at the title for a minute? I would have to.

The question is simple. What is involved (I mean really involved) in being ones own ISP?

Say you get a line provisioned, be it T-1, OC-3, etc. It's ruuning to your house, warehouse, etc. You have the bare line sticking out of a hole in your plaster wall. Now what?

In house:
-What kind of interface do these high bandwidth lines use? (Ethernet?)
- what hardware would you need to split this line to your subscribers?
- what hardware do you use for keeping track of usage and load balancing?
- How do you obtain in IP pool for your users?

For your customers, etc:
- how does one take the bandwidth they have provisioned and feed it to users via dsl?
-What kind of arangements with the telco's are needed and what equiptment?

Is there a site that has this kind of information? It seems like these are well hidden secrets of the internet!

I want to know what you all know about this...

i used to know lots of it as I was trying in the early 90s to be an ISP.

There's lots of specialized hardware for the network interfaces, but no different if you were to setup a datacenter for a good sized company. The biggest difference is that the ISP will have some sort of bandwidth aggregator/load balancing software to track and throttle as needed.

I do recall an ISP looking to split costs with a fledgling ISP that one "franchises" and then sets up, first they give you a rack, then once you've marketed and filled up that space you start to build your own datacenter.

What kind of internet access do you want to deliver? High speed or dial-up? Dial-up is easy and I'll explain that if you want.

If you're looking for DSL-like access, you will need to basically be your own phone company as well.

Whatever you do, firewalls, routers, switches, Dslams and Stingers for DSL.....it just really depends on what you want to do.

For your backhaul, you will setup an agreement with a Tier 1 ISP, like Level3, UUNet, GoodNet, AT&T, Sprint, Qwest, etc. You need high bandwidth from your location to theirs; and a T1 will not cut it. Most ISPs have multiple DS3s or faster, plus you also must think of redundancy. Load-balancers, filtering, etc. is easy enough to setup on say Cisco equipment, which I would recommend.

The IP pool you would get from ARIN. They will assign you a block of IPs that you can put into your DHCP pool for users to pull from, so they have a world routable IP address.

Let me know if you want specifics and I'll post.

Bend & Cynth, thank you a great deal for your responses.

What If my goal was to feed a connection to say 5-8 homes via either dry-loop or pots based DSL.

From the line coming to my home, or to the co-location site, what does this really take to do?

Is it something scalable, so that if it worked it could be taken vertically to a larger audience.

Asking in part from the building the better moustrap mindset here.

Also, wasn't Arin limiting new IP address pools?

It's not an easy business. We started a dialup/hosting business in 94 when customers ran to us and it still had plenty of work before we quit our day jobs. My biggest concern these days would be the politics and expense of last mile connections. Wireless has many advantages there.

Call me jaded but I wouldn't try anything beyond subsidizing my own connection without very deep pockets and a solid exit plan.

Then again, that's my "been there" head talking. I've been away from operations for a couple years. Perhaps Bendsley has more recent and optimistic thoughts?