[mmanfrin]

Does anyone know what it takes to start up municipal fiber? There is a dark fiber line about 4 blocks from my house (in Berkeley), I feel that if I got enough neighbors to sign on to helping fund the initial costs of piping a connection to that, we could all get much better internet service -- but I don't know where one would start with that.

[JoshTriplett]

You would need to sign up with one or more of the major transit providers, such as Cogent, HE.net, Level 3, XO, or similar. (Or someone who resells such service.) You'd obtain an agreement to hook up that fiber to the Internet (such as via a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet-me_room that the fiber leads to), and pay for the amount of transit you use (commonly billed either by the actual amount of traffic or by the 95th percentile of bandwidth usage). Then you'd need all the necessary equipment to get that connectivity to the various customers. And you'd need either a block of IP addresses to hand out or a NAT infrastructure.

(That leaves out all the non-connectivity-related issues you'd also have to handle, such as billing, cutting off service, collections, abuse reports, legal notices/investigations, support requests, etc.)

[dboreham]

Only time + money. But more of both than you likely want to invest.

Disclosure: built my own ISP 13 years ago after a similar "how hard can it be??" moment.

[jessedhillon]

Have you written up this experience anywhere? I'd love to read that.

[dboreham]

No. I did give a talk locally some years ago but that's all. Like most of us I have a big stack of interesting things I could write about, if I didn't have roughly 2x as much work to do as there is time in the day already... One day!

[ccallebs]

I second this. I'd love to know how ISP companies back then were operated.

[pyvpx]

a bit easier with less scale; otherwise identically to today.

[overdrivetg]

Just saw this which might be useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2fl8ud/how_hard...

Lots of relevant discussion and links in that thread too. Good luck!

[Spooky23]

The biggest issue is who owns the delivery infrastructure. Pole real estate ain't free.

Cities are usually pretty pumped about this, as they can benefit significantly by getting more business and save money on network connectivity.

Google wants free access to poles and low/no cost leases on city property to install infrastructure.

[codingdave]

If you want it to be municipal, then you start with your city council and/or planning office. They will let you know what is needed to proceed.

If you want it to be private, then you need to go find funding.