Selling a Business Line

[Hidden Attribute]

Hi everyone.

Is it legal/ posible to purchase a business line from an existing ISP, then charge clients to access your network?

Example: let's say you purchase a 4Mbps business line from Afrihost/ MWeb/ Telkom/ enter your flavour here, and you connect this to an wireless setup. Your neighbours then wishes to use your wireless: may you charge them, as an ISP would it's clients?

 

[Alton Turner Blackwood]

I don't see how it could be illegal.

ICASA is waaaaaaay to incompetent to even care about it anyway

 

[froot]

This question has been asked a million times before.
As best I can remember, you're just not allowed to let the signal cross over the street, as that's municipal property and there are legal issues with this.
There was however, issues regarding this being seen as a WISP, running without a license.

 

[webtailor]

What about if you are not a wisp... but you are a restaurant or hotel and you want to sell traffic access?

What if you are an "Internet Cafe" and you have such a strong signal that you can give access to all your neighbours? I suppose that is completely legal...

The only thing here -what common sense tells me- check first with the ISP. If they do not allow to re-sell the traffic, you cannot do it. Also you require all the hardware/software behind to control the usage as you do not want your neighbour Mr.Naughty killing the traffic downloading massive files.

 

[Tim the Techxpert]

Hi There,
Webtailor is right. First consult your ISP contract. If you cannot do it it will be in the small print that all too often is not gone through carefully enough.
Traffic crossing roads is I think a more difficult one. Certainly if you want to put a cable across then you need the municipality involved. If it was a wireless well I am not sure how they would detect that.

Regards

Tim

 

[Level7]

To do this legally you need to actually have an ECS and ECNS license. I dont think ICASA is really checking netcafe's etc but Im sure in a pure legal context the licenses would be required.

 

[HavocXphere]

froot - pretty sure that rule was scrapped years ago. and it had nothing to do with streets, just property borders. meaning you can't throw a LAN cable over the wall to your neighbor. as i said...pretty sure that rule is gone though.

regarding the roads - its more the digging up which is an issue. technically you are damaging government property.