mick crane wrote: > > When all this internet kicked off I thought anybody could have a go but > apparently you need to be with a provider.
If you have enough money, skill, and time you can be your own ISP. The nature of "ISP" is in the first word, "Internet". It requires you to be connected to one or more other networks. At normal household scales, it is most cost-effective to buy that connectivity from an entity that has infrastructure in your area. In the early 1990s a single T1 (1.54Mb/s bidirectional) to a larger provide, a router, a server and a set of modems connected to phone lines was all you needed to set up shop as a local ISP. The T1 might be 3 or 4 thousand dollars a month, so you needed a few hundred customers to break even. If your average customer connected at 9600 baud and was online for four hours a day, and a day is really only 12 hours long to account for peak usage patterns, a modem and phone line could support 3 customers and you could hang 160 modems off of that T1, so you would max out at about 600 customers before you started getting enough complaints about speed that they looked for someone else. For the USA, I have great connectivity: there are three ISPs willing to deliver consumer-class gigabit links to my house, so I pay about 5x what I paid in 2000 for a connection 34000x faster. And all the other services that an ISP would offer me, I handle myself with Debian machines. -dsr-
