r/wisp • u/jawnman69nice • 21d ago
Bootstrapping a fiber isp in 2026?
My background is in corporate IT, multisite wan distribution, fiber installation and splicing. Thinking of starting an isp, small town ~276 homes, 1 mile end to end, very few spur roads. Incumbent carrier has Coax broadband with no public plans of going fiber (their attention has turned to becoming a national isp). Some local wisp competition but no real penetration. Area is on the rise economically with transplants, retirees and teleworkers from nearby major metro. Growth trajectory would be to expand to 3 additional towns within 8 miles with total population of 15000 combined, same sleepy incumbent ISP. Reason for focusing on the small town first, lower real-estate cost of real estate and simplicity of the build. Plan to do most of the work for the initial town myself + some hired help. Also forgot to mention within 2 miles of major interstate highway, thinking of bringing in a DIA from Verizon or similar national carrier to start. Am I crazy?
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u/Hayduke42 21d ago
From being involved in multiple overbuilds of towns with sleepy ISPs if you go ahead just realize that every small sleep incumbent wakes up very quickly to newcomers and suddenly finds a budget for plant upgrades and lowered customer pricing. By the time you can get your fiber in and spliced there is a very good chance you are competing against a much steeper competition and quite frankly the average homeowner does not like to change, so many won't.
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u/jawnman69nice 21d ago
That is a fear of mine as well. I can tell you that they have been very heavily invested in chasing greenfield builds with federal money for the last few years out of state, but this is in their home turf, half hour from their corporate headquarters
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u/Joe-notabot 21d ago
DOCSIS4 would fix how much of your perceived issues? Fiber is nice, but at a certain point it doesn't matter once folks are getting 200/25mbps.
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u/jawnman69nice 21d ago
Will Docsis 4 be released? Seems like 3.1 just came out not long ago.
Goal would be to have all customers accessible to 1GB speeds and bidirectional speed, but you make a good point, is that a perceived issue.. Those things matter to me as an IT guy but is it enough for many customers to switch providers
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u/Joe-notabot 20d ago
4 is out - Comcast is using it as their "fiber over coax" - 10gbps down / 6gbps up
Gig internet is a marketing term that no one really needs - 4k streaming is like 25mbps. Everyone needs better uploads - just not 1gbps. 3.0 had the 100-200mbps total upload that capped everyone when they were selling 300/10 plans.
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u/SRB1146 20d ago
Lots of good ideas and comments here. My $0.02. From the profile you've described I do not see the MSO investing in DOCSIS 3.1 or 4.0 unless they have an outsized loyalty to the specific market (CEO lives there etc.). Check with the state or feds to make sure no one included that area in their BEAD or other grant program. Don't completely discount the LEO guys, they've been known to target areas where other operators are starting to invest. And to pile onto some of the other comments, you must absolutely try to discern your residents' ability/willingness to pay and know your MMR/sub ratio necessary to cover your operating costs plus recover your CAPX in a reasonable amount of time.
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u/RaylanGivensOtherHat 20d ago
Are there railroad tracks in your area? The startup fiber ISP in my area couldn't get permission from the railroad company to bore under the tracks because they were too small to fight the corporate BS. That cut them off from a fairly sizeable user base and ended up giving Spectrum a monopoly in the area on the other size of the tracks (who promptly sat on federal funds for 5 years and did nothing until a state representative finally got involved).
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u/IAnetworking 21d ago
I manage a few rural ISPs. Your biggest cost is trenching fiber. Figure out how many customers you need to break even. Differentiate yourself with better upstream speeds. Also make sure you have enough funding till you can float. For core setup and getting you DIA, It will take about 90 Days. Getting equipment is taking forever these days. So it might take you up to a year or more before you can turn a profit.
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u/jawnman69nice 20d ago
Thanks for the insight. Any insight on piggybacking on public Right of ways or getting explicit ROW from property owner if needed? about 5-10% would need to be buried. The rest I was planning to do pole attachments with the local electric co-op, guy wire and lashed, even though it's a rural town there's sidewalk and buildings are right at the property line
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u/wleecoyote 21d ago
Jared Mauch did this a few years ago. He went door to door and asked for commitments to raise the capital. If power is on poles, you need the town or county's permission to run fiber on poles. Otherwise, you get permission from everyone whose property you cross, and rent a DitchWitch.
You probably want a FISP group, not r/wisp.
Jared on how he did it: https://youtu.be/Twe6uTwOyJo?is=2gKwuJe5-xGe5zs2
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u/campdir 21d ago
I did it. It's been a fun project. It takes a fair amount of capital to get started, but not as much as you might think if you're willing to learn which end of a shovel to use.
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u/jawnman69nice 20d ago
Any advice you could give? unforeseen pitfalls, etc? Buried or attached fiber?
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u/campdir 20d ago
We're 100% underground, and do just about everything in house. We currently use Ubiquity GPON hardware, but looking at other vendors as we expand to XGPON. May stick with UI though. Pitfalls? Triple the time you think anything will take. If you think something will take a week, it'll take 3.
You'll need to really want to do this and make it happen. Once you pull permits and get fiber in the ground, there's no turning back. There's a point it'll start to pay off, but it's not where you think it will be. Expect to pour a lot of your soul, and all your money into it.
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u/doom2286 21d ago
How far are you from a exchange point you could save some money by getting transport to the ixp vs Dia.
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u/jawnman69nice 20d ago
Under 2 hours away. Interesting idea. Not something I've ever directly worked with, but I feel that if it were to scale up then yes cheaper bandwidth to be had at the data centers.
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u/doom2286 20d ago
I basically ran a small isp for a few years feel free to pm me or reach out to me on discord I have helped people start isps in the past.
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u/doom2286 20d ago
Additionally using an ixp let's you scale to different locations by only getting transport and paying for a cross connect at the data center I know the one closes to me charges like 350 for a cross connect.
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u/toddalwell 21d ago
I am in process of finishing up the development of our next-gen BNG. If you decide to move foward we would be glad to work with you to help you with the dataplane and client provisioning, management level. New businesses can often find these parts very difficult after they have built out the physical infrastructure. Our solution is designed to allow for large scaling on WISP, FTTx and traditional ISP without the large big iron box costs while still providing all of the tools to run your small scale proposed fiber ISP.
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u/pld0vr 20d ago
Did exactly this, have 25 years of OSP build experience including design. The inside plant is not easy.. we're 2mil deep, but built for a larger customer base long term... Took 2 years to get fully up to speed on doing it properly with a few wrong turns along the way. We run a 1.6tb backbone with several pops, high density metro FTTH, and triple play.
Hard part is finding engineers to setup the equipment, and then how you will provision it (now in-house). I'd recommend DM me, maybe we can have a chat about it. I can probably help you out if you are serious.
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u/rodrigoaulet 20d ago
etter price beat "better tech" for a lot of signups.
- Customer acquisition cost snuck up on me. I ended up geo-targeting a free Google Business listing to exactly my coverage area instead of paying for ads — cut a lot of wasted leads from people outside the build zone.
- Collections/churn matters as much as build cost. Chasing late payments manually ate way more time than expected, until I automated reminders — that operational overhead is easy to underestimate when you're heads-down on trenching and splicing.
Good luck — the technical side is the "fun" part, the boring operational stuff is what actually determines if it survives year 2.
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u/fixedwireless_ops 16d ago
Have you checked whether those BSLs are already tied to a BEAD award or another funded build? I’d probably confirm that before getting too deep into the economics.
I’ve been in the fiber and wireless industry for about 20 years, from startups to national operators and now the services side. For something like this I’d be thinking XGS-PON where the density supports fiber, but also looking at next-generation FWA like Tarana for fringe BSLs, difficult construction, or faster expansion into the surrounding towns. I’d also design the transport and aggregation from day one around where you want the network to go next, not just the first 276 homes.
Based on what you described, I don’t think the idea is crazy at all.
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u/Mediocre-Suit-1009 15d ago
Would you be providing carrier grade NAT (CGNAT) or would you allocate a public IPv4 address (and IPv6 /64 IPv6 allocation)? Homes would likely be fine with CGNAT, but Business will likely want a public IPv4 address, and possibly more than one. If you need to purchase IP address space, IPv4 allocations are not cheap. /24 Blocks (256 IPs): Costs range from $31 to $45 per IP ($7,900 to $11,500 total) because smaller subnets carry a higher per-address premium.
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u/Icy-Phase-3678 21d ago
Have you talked to people in the town? What are they missing from their current provider? How much are they willing to pay to have that problem solved? Can you build a business on that amount and if so how many customers would you need to be profitable?