At first, I thought this was encouraging. But then I checked out the 3 "providers" listed for my country (Germany). One is a club maintaining connectivity for a specific student housing project, one offers only dialup/ISDN, and finally only one offers actual ADSL connectivity. I'm sure it's the same in other countries.
While it's interesting as a concept, I don't really get the feeling there is much to see here. It's also not clear to me how these very few access providers would actually federate without real backbone connectivity.
We have a foundation that is setting up a federation of co-operatives of Neighborhood ISP's that will offer professional, secure and anonymous fiber to the home and farm internet at speeds of 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps up to 80 Gbps. We invite everyone who wants to participate or start their own ISP with our help. We currently have more then 1000 km of backbone on three continents for everyone to hook up their DIY ISP at cost price. We can also set up new backbones in other area's. We produce our own open source hardware switches and routers with fiber, copper ethernet and wifi. You can reach us at aart at knoware dot nl
We will provide courses, tools and investment for anyone willing to attempt to built an ISP, provide privacy protection is your intent.
I started the first public internet provider in my country, to indicate that have some experience.
In Belgium, we are in the process of setting up an associative ISP, the road is long, but we have already started "formallly" to investigate technical solutions for vdsl lines, radio/wifi links; procurement of server, uplink, datacenter.. We have just passed a milestone which was to set up the legal entity supporting our diy isp.
You are right to point out that there is still a lot of work to be done, but this is a step in the right direction imho.
The idea behind this federation at this point is more to advertise the status of the various projects, and connect people together to share expertise (legal and hands-on).
It absolutely is, yes. What you're doing is admirable.
> The idea behind this federation at this point is more to advertise the status of the various projects
Ah, alright then. My first association was there'd by an effort to extricate yourself from the all-pervading surveillance, censoring, and traffic-shaping planned or already taking place. Of course, setting up an organization for knowledge sharing is also a worthy cause.
I sure hope this happens at the federation level too and becomes intrinsically tied to it. But what I am sure of, is that these aspects are some of the main drivers for people I had the pleasure to meet irl, and who are behind these initiatives.
Have always been curious about setting up an ISP. Especially so recently. I have been unsuccessful finding much information, though I haven't tried as hard as I probably could. Anyone have any good links?
From what I understand so far, the model they encourage is:
- register a legal entity (coop, non-proft, corp, whatever)
- register with IANA to get an ipv4 and ipv6 block
- find an ISP who can do the BGP announcements for you (DSL resellers usually support it, even if for a residential connection)
- use something like Quagga for routing, no need for big expensive routers
- connect with whatever premises you want your DYI-ISP to cover: ex: specific building, such as a student dorm, specific residential district with a mesh wifi, cat5 flying all over the place, install your own fiber (it's not that complicated!), etc.
Browsing the FFDN database, a lot of their members are small orgs with 50-100 users. With time, if you encourage a community legal model (coop or non-profit), people will develop more expertise and step up to manage and expand your network.
PS: I'm part of a Montreal mesh community called "Réseau libre" (http://www.reseaulibre.ca). We don't provide Internet, but we build the underlying infrastructure. It's a lot of fun and a great way to learn crazy networking stuff on a shoe-string budget.
> register with IANA to get an ipv4 and ipv6 block
Actually one has to register as a Local Internet Registry with the local monopoly RIR, such as ARIN or RIPE. Only they can request blocks from IANA, which they then allocate to LIRs in exchange for non-trivial membership fees.
Fees in the order of 3,000EUR to join and not much less on a recurring annual basis:
Unfortunately since the ITU proposal for a non-geographic RIR faded some years ago there is no competition in this space, as the existing RIRs refuse to service cross-geography requests.
On top of it, the last I read, getting IP blocks from a RIR (even a decently supplied one like ARIN) is rather difficult as the IPv4 space continually dwindles. Also read that ARIN won't give you IPv6 space unless you first have assigned v4 space. Not sure if that's still true. I only read and research this stuff, haven't actually dealt with these entities myself. For a just starting out ISP, I think you'd be forced to lease IP's from your transit provider.
Yeah, ARIN is $500/yr for ISPs using a /22 or smaller of IPv4 space (i.e. 1022 addresses), $1000 for up to a /20 (4094 addresses): https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html
It's not exactly this.
The "find an ISP who can do the BGP annoucements for you" is not accurate. We encourage each org to announce herself their ranges, when possible.
That is definitely one of the reason for http://www.diyisp.org to be setup right now. The idea would be to have a sort of http://hackerspaces.org (one stop website for hackerspaces around the world) to facilitate discovery and spreading of useful information.
I've done a fair amount of research here. There are few links that just "have everything" as not a ton of people are doing this from the ground up. The biggest bottleneck is infrastructure, which to some extent boils down to government and corporation politics, a lot of which are difficult to reference online.
It seems like the "from around the world" part isn't really up and running yet. I expected to see some of my local SF Bay Area ISPs on the map, but it's only showing some European ISPs right now. Further I wondered what the qualifications for DIY might be--individual-level shared networks or the typical small business thing? Next I wondered why it was so important to know about FDN attending some conference, vs. spending more time explaining in basic terms what they do and what they plan to do.
Members of the FDN Federation are Non-Profit Internet Service Providers sharing common values: volunteer-based, solidarity-driven, democratic and non-profit working; defense and promotion of Net neutrality.
I've always wondered what it would take to setup an ISP. I think customers would be the major pain point (especially in america when competing with Comcast or AT&T).
While it's interesting as a concept, I don't really get the feeling there is much to see here. It's also not clear to me how these very few access providers would actually federate without real backbone connectivity.