ISP Journey Pt. 1

This is the first post in what will hopefully be a series on founding an ISP and/or a SaaS provider. The business plan is obviously not formulated ;), but thankfully these things are relatively cheap, so I can also just do this for fun and education and that’s good enough.

This process started something like 11 months ago, or maybe even a bit before, when I joined the ARIN (The Regional Internet Registry [RIR] for where I am going to be operating) IP assignment waiting list. I had just secured rack space in a DC, bought a few servers, and started leasing a /30 of addresses. My provider is nice, but I want to run a Tor exit node and a few other services, and so want to be in charge of managing my own IP reputation, legal policies, and again, to learn and have fun.

So I joined the wait-list. This process is not very interesting and just involves creating a bunch of different entities on their website for points of contact (billing, admin, etc.), requesting an ASN, and paying a 50$ fee. I’ll come back and update this if I learn any lessons about creating a point of contact, but afaik you can change them with little consequence, so it’s probably fine to just yolo those things. I then requested a /24 block of addresses. ARIN charges different fees based on the size of IP blocks you hold, which ranges from 275$ per year for a /24 of IPv4 and /40 of IPv6, all the way up to over 200,000$ for a /6 (I wonder how many of those there are?). I requested a /24 because I wasn’t sure about my plans or how long the wait would be, but a /20 is like 500$ per year so maybe I should have done that.

After verifying my company, and doing a couple more manual back and forths with support that are part of the process, I joined the queue on Aug 25 2025. Arin publishes the waitlist (they disclaim it’s not an exact queue, since it contains requests of various block sizes, but it sure looks like a queue), so I would check that semi regularly. As I mentioned I was in the queue for about 10 months, which is a lot less than I’d been hearing about from other people. Still a hell of a long time if you need them urgently, but much better than paying thousands of dollars on the resale market.

I’m currently still in the process of being assigned my IP block (I have to pay more fees and do more manual back and forth with support before I actually get it), but once that comes through it’s time to buy a router and get things all installed. The next blog post will probably be about that process and other admin related tasks for initial block deployment.