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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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).
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