Annual LIR fees at RIPE are around 2000€, and includes trainings and tickets to meetings. If anything, this serves as a filter for economically unreasonable ventures. Compared to other expenses, even if run purely on volunteer basis (meaning you are donating your time), this seems easily doable.
I got my own ASN a few months ago (and am in the three+ year waiting list for an IPv4 block), I've been thinking about trying to become a rural ISP in my area, so this is very timely for me.
If you want someone to bounce ideas off of, I've been involved in that space for a very long time and could probably answer a lot of questions with real world experience, regardless of the technology used.
I sincerely appreciate the offer, and would love to take you up on it! My email is available from my profile (via my website), or feel free to grab some time: https://cal.bsprague.com/meet
I've mostly looked at wireless (we're in a valley) and fiber
If you have serious intentions of starting an ISP, I'd recommend beginning conversations with a few transit providers right away, feeling out rates and commit terms. Armed with some market info and contacts there, start to look at v4 auctions via [0] or similar so you can jump the line, though you'll have to pay for the privilege. You probably won't be able to transfer blocks into your org until you have commits from one or more upstreams (I know ARIN, and I'm assuming you're in north america, has some more stringent reqs in terms of overall usage within a specified time period, so choose the auction size appropriately [1]). You may also want to consider taking a block from your transit, they will often reassign a small prefix out of their larger holdings for customer use. You can often use that as justification for transferring future blocks.
After transit, start to look at facilities to host your equipment, 'cause you'll need to demarc somewhere and hand off to your transit as well.
Lots and lots of details to get right, but I personally think it's a lot of fun.
Regarding IPv4 auctions: does a small ISP even need a pool of IPv4 addresses? Mobile providers, such as T-Mobile, happily run IPv6-only networks, and provide 4-6-4 address trssncoding to access IPv4-only sites (hello GitHub).
Would this be more expensive for a small ISP than paying for /26, or whatever pool size is practical?
I believe you're referring to 464XLAT (RFC6877 [0]) and yeah, you wouldn't -need- to have any ipv4 stack at all internally (except at the very edge of the network to number the PLAT devices [1]), but I believe it would cause a higher support burden for the nascent ISP than it would relieve by not having to run v4 and v6 together. There may be devices a customer owns that just doesn't support v6, or has weird bugs that would be a show-stopper for them. Should everything, ideally, be supporting IPv6? Yes, of course. Does v6 work seamlessly in all situations? Absolutely not.
I think the need to run a dual-stacked network, especially one that serves a wider customer base will be required for years, perhaps a decade or more, to come. If we were able to control every device and know it has a well-behaved v6 stack, then it might be a different story (which might be the case of T-Mo, as handset variations are limited in scope and well-defined in that scope, and behavior, mostly). But we still need v4 somewhere, and will continue to need it until the bulk of the internet is migrated.
I've had the luxury in the past of having complete control over the devices running in a v6-only network and even then it was a struggle to confidently say that everything had perfect connectivity at all times, even with tricks like 464XLAT or SIIT [2] at the edge. I can't imagine the pain of a network with heterogeneous customer devices running v6 stacks of varying quality.
Anyway, lots of words to say that it theoretically could be done, I just don't see it successfully being done with all of the variations in a consumer-facing network. The gulf between theoretical and the practical implementation is vast. Personally, the going rate for a block of /24 or /23 or whatever size is a small price to pay for compatibility.
Thanks for the tips! Being in a rural area, there's only a few colocation facilities within ~50 miles, and I need to reach out to them to see who they're connected to. So far, I've only seen that Cogent has a presence here, but the internet doesn't have good things to say about them
> I've only seen that Cogent has a presence here, but the internet doesn't have good things to say about them
They’re good enough and they’re dirt cheap. Pricing really matters since you pass savings on to your customers. Vermont Telecom, as an example of a reasonably sized regional ISP with thousands of customers, uses Cogent as their primary upstream.
I wouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to build something out using hardware or upstream providers that people on Internet forums that don’t have a financial stake in making an ISP work financially and operationally approve of.
I think Cogent has earned their vibes, but if they're all you can get near you, they're ok enough to get started with.
As you get bigger, you can put a router somewhere (or two somewheres) with cogent and more options and transport through cogent to get back to your service area. Looking at your profile, I think if you can get traffic to Denver, you should have more options there.
Cogent is fine for most purposes. They have some odd choices upstream at times but for a smaller project, it shouldn’t be a problem. Later on you could look at a dedicated wave or ring (or tunnel, lots of options!) to another facility that has more diversity and peer through that, but make it work first!
This is great! I wonder how much the presenters country - the Netherlands - has made this easier with the peering. It’s hard for me to imagine just asking big serious networks to patch you in down here in Switzerland is likely to fly.
One may have a good chance talking to people behind projects like https://www.community-ix.net/ and good old in-person networking in places like RIPE meetings. Basically everyone there including people working for large telcos have a personal interest in supporting independent structures.
It does seem easiest to start with an IX, where you can follow the published rules to join the IX and connection your network to it’s without bothering every other member.
Everything is done to prop up the stature of "Lords" (the already big)
And sqeeze out or limit the ambition of serfs wanting to reach Lordly status.
Its a nice place if you are docile donkey that love's being taken care of by lords and have no personal agency whatsoever.
I've mostly looked at wireless (we're in a valley) and fiber
After transit, start to look at facilities to host your equipment, 'cause you'll need to demarc somewhere and hand off to your transit as well.
Lots and lots of details to get right, but I personally think it's a lot of fun.
[0] https://auctions.ipv4.global/
[1] https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#eight5
Would this be more expensive for a small ISP than paying for /26, or whatever pool size is practical?
An ipv4 address costs $30 to purchase at a /24 level, less in larger amounts.
If you are providing service to a customer that's $2.50 a month for a year.
I think the need to run a dual-stacked network, especially one that serves a wider customer base will be required for years, perhaps a decade or more, to come. If we were able to control every device and know it has a well-behaved v6 stack, then it might be a different story (which might be the case of T-Mo, as handset variations are limited in scope and well-defined in that scope, and behavior, mostly). But we still need v4 somewhere, and will continue to need it until the bulk of the internet is migrated.
I've had the luxury in the past of having complete control over the devices running in a v6-only network and even then it was a struggle to confidently say that everything had perfect connectivity at all times, even with tricks like 464XLAT or SIIT [2] at the edge. I can't imagine the pain of a network with heterogeneous customer devices running v6 stacks of varying quality.
Anyway, lots of words to say that it theoretically could be done, I just don't see it successfully being done with all of the variations in a consumer-facing network. The gulf between theoretical and the practical implementation is vast. Personally, the going rate for a block of /24 or /23 or whatever size is a small price to pay for compatibility.
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6877
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6877#section-2
[2] Stateless IP/ICMP Translation
They’re good enough and they’re dirt cheap. Pricing really matters since you pass savings on to your customers. Vermont Telecom, as an example of a reasonably sized regional ISP with thousands of customers, uses Cogent as their primary upstream.
I wouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to build something out using hardware or upstream providers that people on Internet forums that don’t have a financial stake in making an ISP work financially and operationally approve of.
As you get bigger, you can put a router somewhere (or two somewheres) with cogent and more options and transport through cogent to get back to your service area. Looking at your profile, I think if you can get traffic to Denver, you should have more options there.