Does anyone know what it takes to start up municipal fiber? There is a dark fiber line about 4 blocks from my house (in Berkeley), I feel that if I got enough neighbors to sign on to helping fund the initial costs of piping a connection to that, we could all get much better internet service -- but I don't know where one would start with that.
You would need to sign up with one or more of the major transit providers, such as Cogent, HE.net, Level 3, XO, or similar. (Or someone who resells such service.) You'd obtain an agreement to hook up that fiber to the Internet (such as via a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet-me_room that the fiber leads to), and pay for the amount of transit you use (commonly billed either by the actual amount of traffic or by the 95th percentile of bandwidth usage). Then you'd need all the necessary equipment to get that connectivity to the various customers. And you'd need either a block of IP addresses to hand out or a NAT infrastructure.
(That leaves out all the non-connectivity-related issues you'd also have to handle, such as billing, cutting off service, collections, abuse reports, legal notices/investigations, support requests, etc.)
No. I did give a talk locally some years ago but that's all. Like most of us I have a big stack of interesting things I could write about, if I didn't have roughly 2x as much work to do as there is time in the day already...
One day!
