Resistant to shutdowns and ISP sadly don’t go well together. The state will undoubtedly have the resources to find and shut down your infrastructure just like anyone else’s.

There’s merit in decentralised networking, such as LoRA or other long-range radio standards, but they likely won’t have appeal until they’re necessary. As such, your best customers will be clandestine or oppositional orgs; hardly a lucrative market.

Not to say don’t bother, just know that the value of any sort of venture like a cooperative is the social relations to your labour, which is something that a capitalist cannot simply switch off with their command to the state.

I think the first step is become a “network engineer”. If you wouldn’t consider yourself that already then there’s your first step that should keep you busy for a while. The rest should make sense once you’ve done that.

I assume it’s a lot of stuff with BGP and other communication protocols for managing networks.

I’m not USian but in Europe/Germany we have Freifunk and the DN42. I’m sure there will already be local initiatives if you are in a somewhat populated region. Hit up some hacker spaces or maker communities or even amateur radio people and somebody will probably point you into the right direction.

There’s a lot of neat stuff going on with wireless networking these days: LoRa, Meshtastic, Reticulum, WiFi HaLow. These are mostly pretty low bandwidth, but are good ways to build out mesh networks that can maintain local communication during broader internet shutdowns.

https://startyourownisp.com/

Look at Reticulum, not an ISP but a network stack that runs on many different connections including LoRa. NomadNet is for markdown webpages and there are a few ways to message others.

two sentences for something that is certainly complex as hell.

i noticed a lot of these resources don’t mention the cost of the numbers (IPv4, IPv6, ASN). it’s more expensive than you’d think given that it’s just numbers.

If you aren’t looking to use one of the many alternatives others suggested and want to do something traditional, look at SandyNet in Oregon and US Internet in Minnesota. Especially the former, since Sandy is a lot smaller. They’re locally created fiber networks, the former being city run, that eventually expanded into full offerings competing or replacing Xfinity, etc.

I remember posts on Reddit years ago asking similar questions too and there was one from somebody who was putting satellites on their neighbors houses and sharing their Internet that way. It was more piggybacking off of an existing ISPs business class service though, I believe. So not as resilient against downtime.

I know some people who did this, I don’t have any details but is is definitely possible

I know they did this in Cuba. I don’t know if I can find the old videos about it though

This is really interesting and could be really valuable in the future, but I don’t know the first thing on the subject.

Is this something we could build together as a community? How does one get involved? What infrastructure is needed from a rando who continues? Are there security risks involved?