I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.

You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.

Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).

Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.

We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.

I legit wish I had known about you a few years ago when writing my thesis. It was about community run broadband internet. I was trying to identify repeatable models for communities who wanted to run their own ISPs to use. This would have been so helpful!

Side note, truly inspirational an something I would love to do in my little village in Ohio.

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking more about your thesis? I am interested in rural internet as well for Native American reservations and both opie's and your comments are inspiring and something I definitely want to read.

I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.

I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).

I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.

Year 1: $52/mo Year 2: $74/mo Year 3: $98/mo

I have made no changes to my account.

This is why we need choices for ISP's.

That's a beautiful thing.

This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.

how can I do this for my city?

Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?

This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.

Do you operate it as a nonprofit? Seems like you could be at least seeing some tax benefits probably