I'm building a small rural ISP and web hosting service, as a way to learn about low-level networking stuff. I've got an ASN + IP space, and am working out the details with a colo, local fiber provider, and some upstreams. Right now I'm configuring the hardware itself (server, router, switch, etc) and learning all the bits and bobs (Proxmox, BGP, OPNsense, IXPs, etc)
All I can say is good luck. We spun up a co-op isp to take advantage of fiber grants for rural areas about a decade ago.
Maybe it was because of the grants, but it was a fucking nightmare getting off the ground even though we had nearly 90% of the population in three counties on board for the co-op. The red tape and regulations (in our state at least) made it clear that government runs for urban and suburban interests and actively undermines rural needs. I'm talking government in bed with large providers who had exclusive rights to run "high-speed" Internet to our towns and farms, even though they had never and were never planning on anything above dsl for most people and cable for the ones in town.
If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.
And that's the story of a) when we got sued by a large provider that I hope goes out of business and burns to the ground, and b) the last time I volunteered on a large project and why I will never take the lead on anything bigger than the Lion's Club pancake breakfast now.
Oof, thanks for sharing and the well wishes.
I'm funding this myself, and my current approach (hopefully!) avoids most of the red tape. I'm leasing fiber from a local ISP for the colo <-> my home connection, and once I have myself as a successful "customer" of my own ISP, I'll start doing the last mile build out, which is where I expect the red tape to begin.
But I haven't decided if I'll do fiber or wireless, and if I go wireless, I might be able to avoid pole agreements entirely by just working directly with my neighbors. The problem is that our area is pretty heavily wooded, so I'm not sure if I can place antennas high enough to cover a reasonable swatch of the area.
Our best approach was to run fiber in the ground in the public right-of-way on county or local streets and avoided the state highways. It was much easier to get easements with property owners and local towns than the state (as far as I know, our request is still sitting unread with the state). That meant we had to build twice, essentially. Once for the north of the major highway that bisects the area, and once for the south. But that cut out all of the nonsense with existing agreements from the state. So that helped.
Most property owners we had to cut across were willing to forego payment of any kind for free fiber hardware, and access at reduced rates for 10 years. So that was nice.
We didn't evaluate wireless, just because of the terrain, but I do know a local chap who is providing that for folks using grain bins for line-of-site access points. That's seemed to work well for his use case.
> If I was more charismatic (and wasn't 1000% sure there were pictures of me doing drugs when I was in college), I would consider a run for state office, because it's a shit show for small towns here.
Loads of politicians have come back from worse! Don't let that hold you back.
Best of luck with this. If you get the web hosting part going and need to stick a load balancer in front of web servers/front end proxies, may I suggest that you give my project[1] a go? Speaks BGP directly to your routers to advertise healthy services and scales from small VMs (for services that are only a few gigabits/s) to physical servers if you need to serve tens of gigabits/s traffic.
Shameless plug, sorry (not sorry!) but I would have killed for it when I worked in web hosting :-)
[1] https://github.com/davidcoles/vc5