I’m not so sure I understand how this works. How exactly would you become an ISP? Who would you need to talk to and how exactly would you make it work? As I understand, there are major players like AT&T that are pretty much the “backbone” of the internet, and you need to talk to those guys if you want to “resell” internet locally. But, I’m curious to know how much something like this would cost… and how easy would it be to, say, get fibre going in a small residential area. Every resource I found online doesn’t delve deep into how it works and the steps you would need to take to make it happen.
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If you build your own actual access network, you will have to lay cables around in the neighbourhood.
To build your own virtual backbone, you buy IP range and ASN from ARIN or its sub branches. IPv4 ranges have already sold out years ago, you may need to buy them from circulation.
Then you lease backbone circuits from those backbone ISPs, those are circuits, not actual internet, what runs inside of your circuits is your own business. You can use these circuits to build your own backbone network by connecting them via routers and assign the IPs in your IP ranges to routers and devices connected to your own backbone.
The last step is connecting it to the internet backbone. Usually you are not big enough to ask for ISPs to peer with you so you have to buy IP transit links from them. These transit links connect your network to the real internet. You need to discuss route broadcast details to broadcast routing information of your IP ranges to the public internet via BGP, so routers on public internet backbone will know where to send packets destined for your IP.
Think of ISP as the company that owns the power lines within a city. They outsource power and distribute it to homes via the transmission lines. The ISP gets its “internet” from large companies whose main business is establishing reaaaaaaaaaally long undersea cables. I forgot the term but in our power line analogy, they’ll be the powerplants. Since internet isn’t really some tangible thing like electricity, but rather connection (and speed), the entire internet is just a bunch of computers talking to one another.
If you want to resell internet locally (ie. have your own local ISP for, say, a town), usually you’ll have to buy an allocation from a distributor, in this case maybe AT&T. And then you’ll set up a sort of hub, and connections to the homes (and establish fees, permits, etc etc). The cost itself depends on how far you are from a distributor, the infrastructure present, how resistant/amenable local government is. But many local co-ops have done such for their towns. It’s just that major ISP companies often try to shut those down (through local ordinances via politics, or coz those eat at their market share, profits, etc).
In order to be an ISP, you have to a: build a network to connect all your clients up to, and then b: get your network connected to the Internet.
Building a network, there’s lots of ways that might look. You might have a cable TV distribution system to work with, or a copper-loop telephone system, or some other pre-existing wired setup which can be adapted to carry computer network data. Or you might lay your own cables. Or you might set up point-to-point wireless infrastructure, or something else.
Getting your network connected to the internet, well, the only viable way of doing that is to buy an internet connection from one of the existing ISPs, and this makes you a “reseller” of their internet connection.
If you wanted, you might buy a few different internet connections from a few different ISPs. This could give you some advantages. First, it makes you more outage-proof. If one of your uplinks goes dead temporarily, your clients can still reach the internet via the others. And when all the uplinks are functioning, your clients can benefit from dynamic routing protocols, and their data can be sent through whichever uplink provides a fastest/shortest path to the destination.
The big players in the business, though, the AT&T’s and the Verizons, they don’t have to *buy* internet connections for a monthly fee like the small fish do. They have something called “peering agreements”. That’s an arrangement where they agree mutually to deliver traffic destined for one another’s networks and IP ranges, without charging or being charged for the data. The reason they can do this when the rest of us can’t, is that their networks are so big, that others being able to reach them, and reach places *via* them, is just as important as them being able to reach out.
Small ISPs say “Systems on our network need to be able to reach the internet”. Big ISP’s – we call them Tier 1 providers – say, “Systems on our network ARE the internet, and you gotta pay us to reach them.”
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