Starting an ISP is hard (2016)

Indeed, it sounds easier to start a bank. Probably more profitable also.

Interesting read. It seems to me some of the long tail risks mitigated by expensive redundancies might be an acceptable risk for the customers. For example, the article indicates that they have redundant power suppliers, along with 2 days worth of diesel for on-premise generation. Apparently keeping the second power company available is a recurring cost. What are the chances power is cut to the office for more than 2 days that (1) doesn't also affect the other power company (e.g., earthquake, hurricane, etc.) and (2) couldn't be mitigated by purchasing more diesel? Even if (1) and (2) are true, couldn't this just be a reasonable outage?

With the power of blockchains by your side, start your own bank today.

Starting an ISP doesn't have to be that hard at all. If you want to start one in the country where I live you could do so with very little investment.

All the issues he talks about are due to the fact that there is no real competition in the US and no infrastructure to support competition.

The way it works over here is that there is a (commercially owned) open fiber network which can be used by anyone who wants to, and prices are the same for everyone. This network owns the last mile fiber, a PoP in each neighbourhood and a City-PoP linked to the neighbourhood PoP's.

You want to start a small ISP with very little investment ? Just lease everything from one of the bigger players. Bandwidth, IPTV service, etc. can all just be repackaged and resold under your own brand name and you can work on getting a customer base. You could run this from your basement without buying a single piece of hardware.

Want to spend a little more ? Use your own backbone network and uplink to the internet, but lease all the last-mile stuff from one of the bigger ISP. Go ahead. Want to do everything yourself ? You can rent space in the PoP's and install your own equipment, all you'd need from a 3rd party is to lease the last mile dark fiber.

You can pretty much choose anything from just reselling an existing package to doing everything yourself except owning the physical fiber and PoP your equipment is placed in. IIRC the situation on DSL is similar.

My current ISP started out as one of those that pretty much resold existing packages and currently they are on the other end of the spectrum and run their entire network by themselves including spinning off their own TV provider that now sells IPTV services to other small ISP's.

Net result of all this: at my address I can choose between 13 ISP's on fiber alone.

How do you get to a situation like this ? Very simple. Make sure the government only issues permits for the installation of a broadband network if the network to be built is going to be open to everyone.

This is a fiber-based ISP vs a wireless-based one (which the earlier article was about)