I see this as the main problem of owning a server. When you self-host your stuff, you have to maintain a server on top of whatever you do with the things you host int here. If it breaks down, you're cut off from your services.
In the early days there was this guy that rented a storefront in a local shopping mall and had a T1 line in his store (1.544 Mbps). He set up point to point microwave connections with his customers to provide always-on Internet service and guaranteed at least 64 kbps. This was his main source of income that kept it all going, until the store went out of business. You can provide service to others. It would be like opening your own little corner grocery store and buying stuff online or from bigger local stores to stock your own shelves so nearby neighbors won't have to travel as far to buy a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs. With Internet service you'll still be bound by the terms of your ISP that your little ISP uses to get to the Internet. You'll also need to tell your ISP what you're doing with their service to make sure they're ok with it. The thing with Internet service though it that the big ISPs will charge less than you do, if you want to stay in business, so your would be customers would probably just get service from them instead. Let us remember how third party cell carriers operate. They rent time on the networks owned by the bigger carriers and provide "discount" service with a catch. The primary users have priority so if you are a third party user and a primary user shows up and the local cluster can't service both of you the primary user gets the cell and you get the boot.
Hey, you're going to pay for that either way. Cloud based servers will have a stock of parts and will get to it sooner, but you have direct access to work on your own, including booting it any way you want to. Cloud servers operate in bulk so they can distribute that financial load while you probably can't. Some cloud servers may charge for CPU time and may really limit things like memory and data use. I was looking into a web hosting service that wanted to limit the service to a specific number of page loads. I turned them down. I figure after I have made the investment it's just a matter of keeping it going. This way I get all the CPU time I want and all the data I'm willing to pay for.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I don't really want to be an ISP, I was just hoping I could be my own ISP. But, obviously I can't. Wish I knew more of how that works because I'm curious.
Questions are the path out of ignorance. We all start out with ignorance and then we learn. That's just how it works. You might try creating a chain of relays to a source of free wifi like a coffee shop or store somewhere. That could be pretty expensive to create and maintain. Not too sure about the legality though. It might get pretty slow too.
What would make it expensive to create? The hardware? Just curious.
All of the computer equipment, the radio equipment, and power supplies. You'd need a way to charge the batteries. It would need to be weather proof.
In the EU there's always talk about chat control. So it might not be a bad idea to set up my own jabber/xmpp server at home in the future. It's not that I have anything to hide, but conversations between me and my wife, my kids, my friends, my boss etc.. are nobody else's business. If it comes to that, I'll add jabber/xmpp to my home server.
