What do you need to be an ISP

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Vitamin_uk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 6, 2004
Messages
181
How would you go around setting up your own ISP? obviosuly you would need some heft badnwith!
 
bandwidth and a way for people to connect in... i.e. a bank of modems or DSL links or whatever
 
if search isnt borken on here, search for posts in the networking forum about becoming an isp, youll find a wealth of information. if that doesnt work, use google to search the hardforum.com website
 
Equipment wise: 3 sun fire 280R servers, 2 Cisco AS5200 or AS5300 Universal Access Servers. 1 Cisco 2900 switch or better, 1 Cisco 2611 router or better.

The sun fire would do all the mail web and accounts. The AS5x00s would handle the dial-in stuff. And the router and switch is self explanatory.

Equipment cost is around $30,000 or so (used market.) You going to need 2 BRI T1s for the Access servers. And prolly 1 more T1 or higher for internet. Running Cost on connectins is going to be around $3000 or higher a month. Startup cost on connections is going to run around 5,000.

This is just a start..

:D
 
It might help if the internet backbone was running through your mom's basement. :D
 
did you ever post pics in that thread of yours?? i cant find the thread offhand....
 
Originally posted by TrueBuckeye
It might help if the internet backbone was running through your mom's basement. :D
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HAHAHAH I remember that :D
 
lol chance would be a fine thing!!!1


O but wait !!! I got fibre runnign past my house! it provides my school and the whole town with an 8meg link!!!!
 
With the help of ebay you could start up a very small ISP for probably under 2k in equipment. Not great equipment, but functional none the less. You're going to get stuck with the bandwidth charges though. T1 lets say for 1000 a month with a 2 year contract including the router. Lets say another maybe $600 for a cas t1 to get started with. So now you have 1700 in costs (lets say 100 a month toward paying off your equipment) a month. Thats 85 customers you need instantly to break even, not counting your time spent, which will be alot. If you fail of course you still have a contract and your providers are going to want their money.

Fiber doesn't matter,you don't just tap into it like copper, but more importantly do you know what the costs would be bringing fiber in and the half a rack to full rack of equipment it would terminate in? They won't even consider it for a residence anyway.

My advice is to try and find a job at an isp or something, you'll get the knowledge you would need to run an isp if you wanted to some day, and you'll probably also see most people fail at it.
 
Originally posted by Zardoz
Equipment wise: 3 sun fire 280R servers, 2 Cisco AS5200 or AS5300 Universal Access Servers. 1 Cisco 2900 switch or better, 1 Cisco 2611 router or better.
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A Cisco access server is WAY overkill for ISP needs. All you need is a Lucent/Livingston Portmaster ($150-400 on eBay). Get a T1 from the telco (for 56k dial-up users) and connect ethernet to your internet feed. You are done, that simple. For DSL ISP it's gets way more complicated and expensive.

You can start a ISP for next to nothing in hardware with eBay. So much ISP gear up there it's not even funny. The cost is in the monthly charges for colocation and internet bandwidth. Not to mention the hardest part, you need customers. Now days small ISP are all but dead. You can't compete against the big boys (AOL, Earthlink, etc). This is the main reason you see so much ISP gear on eBay in the first place.
 
Originally posted by TrueBuckeye
It might help if the internet backbone was running through your mom's basement. :D
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that made me happy this morning :)
 
Originally posted by Anthony.L
A Cisco access server is WAY overkill for ISP needs. All you need is a Lucent/Livingston Portmaster ($150-400 on eBay). Get a T1 from the telco (for 56k dial-up users) and connect ethernet to your internet feed. You are done, that simple. For DSL ISP it's gets way more complicated and expensive.

You can start a ISP for next to nothing in hardware with eBay. So much ISP gear up there it's not even funny. The cost is in the monthly charges for colocation and internet bandwidth. Not to mention the hardest part, you need customers. Now days small ISP are all but dead. You can't compete against the big boys (AOL, Earthlink, etc). This is the main reason you see so much ISP gear on eBay in the first place.
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Yup, you can do that as well, but the 5200 access servers are going for about 300-400 as well, Point here is that there -IS- a lot of stuff that you can get. Some very nice, some a little cheeper. I also agree that whats really going to cost is the feeds, telco connects. and location.
 
Yes dial up is dead, thats why I got out in 2000. You can sell high speed, its just more advantageous to resell another companies as your own, you may only make a few bucks a month on those customers but you have zero hardware overhead.

For that matter you can outsource dial-up too, as well as newsgroups etc. You just become a re-seller of someone elses services, which appear to be your own. That's the route I was considering taking when I was in the biz still. I sold out to a larger competitor instead.

Anyways, more on topic... I had a T1 for internet. I had some analog lines in the beginning. Then as I grew and added lines I started to use T1's for dial up and just call the phone company to turn on more channels as needed and buy another 8 port card for my rack. The channels came in the back of the rack into dig/ana converters, then through the front of the racks out the modem ports and into the comm server, then out to the net.

Ballpark costs: T1 was about $1200 plus a $1000 loop fee, (I was FAR from the POP) The $1200 is paid to the ISP the loop is paid to the phone company. You pay a per-mile, per-month fee for the connection. Some backbone providers will include the loop in your bill for you, mine was separate.

I had 140 dialups, of which about 28 were analog. Phone lines arent cheap in a business either. You're looking around $30 a line per month whether be digital or analog.

At any rate, I paid roughly $5-6k a month for the T1 and dial-ups, another $1200 for rent, $200-300 for elect. another $1200 a month for full page ads in 3-4 phone books. $1200 for a highschool kid to do tech support. Plus whenever I upgraded I paid those hardware costs out of pocket, roughly $3k whenever I added 8 ports, between hardware and telco setup fees. That ball parks to around $9900 a month, out the door!

I used a 10:1 ratio on users per lines, so I could have had 1400 customers although I only had 1200. Granted people stay on line longer these days, so that ratio has prolly been halved. 1200 customers @$17.95 a month comes out to $21540, minus $9900= $11640 that my brother and I drew our pay from, plus put money back into the company.

I made a good living... but keep in mind when we first opened I was drawing only $400 a week and working 12 hour days, 7 days a week for the first 5 months. We started everything with $40k which covered all servers, hardware, setups etc, rent, paychecks for about 5 months. So if we werent breaking even in 5 months, we would have closed the doors :) Things worked out though!

Oh yeah might help to mention, we only had 15 dialups to start, of course we didnt tell customers that :)
 
Originally posted by Vitamin_uk
lol its nice to hear from someone who has done it!
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I started to do it, but seen where it was going, and really did not have the cliant base to make it big enough to sell it out within a year or 2. I just started to late...
 
It was a great experience nonetheless, especially when we'd have friends come in the office with their PC's. We'd close early on a friday around 10am and start hitting the rum n cokes whilst playing Quake :) We'd still do tech support tho hehe, I wonder if anyone knew we were drunk?

I only got $60k on the buyout, which wasnt a TON. It was just kinda like, make a decent living for 5 years and get a pretty nice bonus at the end. He paid me $2500 a month for two years :D Of course I dont have much to show for it now!
 
I think vitamin_UK needs some UK pricing, here is what I have been quoted for in the past and prices I have found of kit you would need;

In the UK, we dont have T1's, instead its known as an E1, which if you bond all channels together (64k channels), you can get 2.048Mbps, or 30x digital lines (this is a universal line, so will work with both analog 56k for example or ISDN up to 64k per B channel), an E1 will set you back around £1300 a month, with a £2500 installation charge (per connection) for an E1 direct from BT, each channel of the E1 costs I believe £85 per month if I recall correctly....

That would be the incomming connections, remember that with a single E1 (full) you will get a maximum of 30 simultaneous connections, which means you will either have to limit to single channel ISDN connections (no bonding) and single channel analog connections, or buy in more E1 lines....

Probably the easiest way of getting the lines connected would be either a 3Com SuperStack II RAS 1500, with an external T1/E1 modem bank, which connects to the RAS 1500, pretty cheap now on eBay. Otherwise, you will want to buy a Cisco AS5200, with an E1/T1 card (ensuring it comes with the MICA modem cards installed to use the incomming E1 lines), these units can take up to 2x E1/T1 lines. The good thing about the AS5200 is that you can infact use these as a router too, so connect to your internet connection. To accomodate up to 2.048Mbps of bandwidth, you could either go a cheap option and get an SDSL line installed (which will cost around £150 a month), but its most likely SDSL is not available in your area. The next possible choice is to get a leased line installed, at present the cheapest leased line in the UK is offered by EasyNet @ £3000 installation and around £400 a month (exVAT) per month for a 2Mbps leased line, this does include an SLA (99.9% is the usual) and a Cisco managed router (2600 series last time I checked)....

It is possible to get both E1 and leased lines installed in residential premises, infact EasyNet have no problem installing fibre to any location, but if you want to spend £14,000 on installation only to find you have to move house :eek:

You will need a mail/web/DNS/RADIUS server, this *could* be handled by one box, but if you find your box going down (hardware or software failure), it would take your entire ISP with you. Instead you should purchase seperate box's (redundant for tasks such as DNS and RADIUS)..... you could just build standard type PC's (rackmounted would be recommended), but they would need to be high quality and not cheap components !

If you are going to do this at home, ensure there is good enough security and cooling, the last thing you want is your equipment stolen (say goodbye to your business instantly) or your equipment failing because your heating is on :eek: )
 
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