Comment by idiotsecant
10 months ago
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
10 months ago
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
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That's a beautiful thing.
https://startyourownisp.com/
Useful threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
how can I do this for my city?
Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
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