[parliament32]

>labor costs

It depends. If you're constantly doing new customer setup/teardown, yeah that'll cost man-hours. But once your network is up and running it really doesn't take much work to keep it running.

My ISP is a very small local outfit. They have a "few thousand" customers... and the whole thing is run by literally two dudes, doing everything from netops to hw installs to billing and support. Yeah I'll have a few hour outage once every few months, but overall the service is great and it really doesn't take that much effort to keep things ticking.

[Teknoman117]

Are you willing to share what the ISP is called? Sounds like it may be a fun read.

[parliament32]

They don't have any written material, this is just from talking to the guys. Turns out starting an ISP isn't hard if you can lease last mile from one of your local big boys (and here, by law, they have to make last mile available for lease at a reasonable price).

Basically rent a quarter cab in a colo, get a router (or two), a switch (or two), and a server (or two). Negotiate with last mile provider and a pair of upstreams. Get your DC to x-connect you to your upstreams and last mile provider. Do some marketing (elevator ads in residential apt buildings are apparently basically gold). Buy a pallet of cable modems, spend a few weeks configuring your crap... $50k later, you have an ISP, and you can offer service at 50% of the big boys' rates while still raking in a substantial profit.