Thinking of creating an ISP - advice?

[valec]

Well I'm so frustrated with the service of my local ISP's, and also wanting to find the best way to advance my skills and knowledge that I'm wanting to look at starting some form of ISP.
any advice on what would be involved in getting a really small dialup isp going?

[NotQuiteHere]

Well... this is the way I look at it...... no matter what... everyone hooks up to an ISP... even another ISP. So... you'll always deal with the locals... since your lines have to run through them first. Of course... I may be wrong.... but thats the way it seems to me.

[DemonKnight]

More money and time than its worth IMO... your going to need to get some fairly good servers, some expensive highspeed lines (not DSL either, your going to want at least a T1 simply because its designed for industrial use) dont forget tech support for all the people that dont know what they are doing, then you'll need to monitor hourly usage (unless you only offer unlimited time)

I would look around and try some other ISPs... theres alot more to it than just having some one call your computer. (your computer would then intern call the phone companys system, which would then actually set you up to the net..)

[valec]

Yeah I pretty much worked most of that out.
I guess my biggest thing is I want to know alot about a very broad range of the technical factors of ISP's. I guess I should just hurry up and get my CCNA, and above and start trying to get a sys admin job. If only they didn't always require 5+ years exp :/

On a side note, what sort of download speeds would you expect from a 256k wireless connection? I'm getting pretty low speeds since I got it 3 days ago. I'm in perfect range with full signal strength. The latency blows, which was expected, but I'm sure my d/l's should be faster than this. Mind you it does depend on the connection at the senders end I guess.

[DemonKnight]

What kinda speeds are you seeing? (granted I'm still using dial up, and going from that wich averages out to around 3-4Kbps you should be getting any where from 15-25Kbps (i've noticed DL speed is almost always 1/10 of your connection speed my friend with DSL (connection at 1Mbps gets around 1-150Kbps DL speed.)

[valec]

Yeah, I'm getting about 14Kbs, but I used to be on a 128k adsl connection and get 15-20. I've had one d/l come in at 60 since I got it, but still an average of 14.