Comment by arca_vorago | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arca_vorago | Hacker News Reader

My very first real job at 16 was a WISP that served a small town in Arizona (~8k pop), by having a microwave tower on top of a hill in the middle of the town and just tying a few t1s in. The factor that got this WISP traction though was that we were doing family friendly filtering for customers, and in a religious town that went over pretty well. I left because I ended up doing too much of the work for $6 dollars an hour and I was just discovering "hacker culture" and started to disagree with the filtering we were doing.

I think my main question about starting a WISP these days is how the hell can I find out who to talk to about getting access to a certain tower and if there is fiber at the tower available for tie-in.

My grandparents live in a mountain village that gets lots of tourists in the summer, and it's in a valley with a large tower on top of one of the mountains that has los for the entire valley, but I can't seem to figure out who to ask about costs/contracts etc. With the tourist influx though I could easily see it being fairly profitable, and there is no other ISP option besides sat and frontiernet.

(author here) This is actually probably the hardest part of the whole thing - finding places to put the equipment and negotiating leases with all the right people.

If it's an actual cell phone tower you're looking at you can usually find it on the FCC website and find out who manages the tower. Most cell phone towers are managed by a third party management company (like Crown Castle or American Tower). The management company can usually tell you if there's fiber although their info is often outdated or just wrong. Even if the tower is owned and managed directly by a cell phone company they are still required to allow you to collocate (FCC!) but they will usually drag their feet through the process - plan on 9-12months and lots of red tape.

As for finding fiber - you can use a paid solution like fiberlocator.com. You can also drive around and look for fiber infrastructure, although admittedly it's hard to recognize if you don't know what you're looking for (or even if you do.) Frustratingly even when you find a company with fiber in the area they usually won't tell you where exactly the termination points are. You can sometimes give them a list of addresses and they'll give back yes/no for each one, though.

I keep track of fiber deployments in Chicago by looking at the city's permit database (which is public and has a pretty usable search UI hooked up to it). Might not be as easy in other cities but I'm wondering if it suggests a general strategy of looking to local government for help in finding fiber. Maybe something as basic as finding the guy who issues permits to dig up streets and asking if he remembers who's been laying conduit recently and where. No idea how well this would work in practice outside of Chicago.

As a side note, depending on the municipality/county, there are GIS databases that show who owns the land and some basic information on them.

A Google search for "<muni> GIS map" usually has some pretty promising leads.

> managed directly by a cell phone company they are still required to allow you to collocate (FCC!) but they will usually drag their feet through the process

No way! Is that only for ISPs or could I get a ham repeater up there if I had enough time/money?

I believe you could put a ham radio up there but it's quite expensive - most tower contracts I've seen are $1200-$2500/month. Also if the tower is already full (at it's structural capacity for wind loading) then you would have to pay for upgrades before you could hang your HAM (which would be tremendously expensive!)

Uf! Yeah, that's pretty spendy but not out of line with what I expected.

Very cool though, always awesome to hear how this stuff works in practice.

There's a small market for "filtered ISPs."

There are Christian ones.[1] There are Jewish ones.[2] And there are ultra-orthodox Jewish ones that allow only a short whitelist of sites.[3] It seems to be a declining business; "kleenweb" and "koshernet" are gone. "crosswayisp.net" is still selling dial-up.

[1] http://www.christianbroadband.com/ [2] http://www.thejnet.com/ [3] http://www.yeshivanet.com/faq/index.php

If you can't figure this out - don't do business...

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