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Comment by grahamburger | Hacker News Reader

Oh Hi! Author of https://startyourownisp.com/ here. Happy to answer questions.

You mentioned problems scaling in the article. Can you elaborate on that? Will you update that later on?

Yeah, good question. I don't think it's anything more cryptic than what it takes to scale any business, I was just trying to point out that I made a deliberate decision to focus on what's needed to get from 0 customers to 'some' customers instead of what's needed to get from 'some' customers to many customers. I do hope to eventually go in to more depth about what it takes to scale larger.

Briefly, here are some of the challenges WISPs run in to as they scale:

-Getting contracts with relay sites / towers / places to put their wireless infrastructure. This is one of the most time consuming parts of building a WISP, and it's primarily just about waiting and red tape and making lots of phone calls.

-Geographic limitations - IE we have our little valley covered and we've got as many customers here as we're gonna get, now what? It would cost $XXX to go over to the next town/city/county and we don't really have that or don't have the resources to feel like we could handle that logistically, so we're just gonna stay where we are.

-Network upgrades. IE 10 years ago a 5Mbps connection was pretty good! So we built a network that would deliver that. Now customers want 50Mbps, and the technology is there, but we don't have the capital or the know-how to go do a full network and technology upgrade.

For a moment there I almost thought I was reading about a business that was content making some money and employing some people, rather than presuming that mindless, infinite growth is the only possible path.

I was probably imagining it or projecting my perverted ideals but what a beautiful, refreshing moment it was :)

I get what you're doing and at the risk of taking the bait I want to point out that this is actually the way that a lot of WISPs that I know of operate. Build a network up to a certain number of customers that can be supported by 1-5 people and just leave it there and run it as a lifestyle business, or eventually sell it. I personally know maybe 10 or 12 people who are now doing or have done that in the past.

There are of course also businesses in this market that want to continue growing and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

How do you compete against 4g/5g and the inevitable lowering of the cost of cellular data ?

you're competing against a market that is determined that it's going to keep costs high for the consumer. In some countries people use 4g routers at home instead of wired connections because of how cheap it is, whereas in the UK it's almost $20 for a 4gb plan with most data providers. If the result is that data providers reduce prices, thats a major win for accessibilty.

Good question. Will have to see what happens as 5g becomes a reality.

A few years ago when WiMax was gonna be the 'next big thing' in wireless I remember a lot of people asking what we (WISPs) were gonna do cause it would put us all out of business. Two things happened: 1) We deployed WiMax gear for our customers. If WiMax succeeded we succeeded with it. 2) WiMax was terrible, we could provide much better service without it than with it. Currently many WISPs actually are deploying 4G-LTE equipment for their customers, and that actually works really well - so that's a good situation for WISPs and their customers. Yet to see what 5G will bring.

> Currently many WISPs actually are deploying 4G-LTE equipment for their customerS

What is the use case here ? Is this for business customers ? How do they manage regulations around 4G frequencies ?

Mostly residential customers. WISPs are mostly deploying in CBRS band (3.6Ghz) which is available for this explicitly. Check out Bai Cells for an example of the equipment being deployed: https://baicells.com

Thanks for answering. Do you have any idea of how the economics work out ?

Yeah, pretty good idea. As mentioned up the thread I run a web site dedicated to this kind of thing: https://startyourownisp.com/ we're getting kind of deep in the thread but I'd be happy to chat further via email. I think it's on my profile or my contact info is on that site.

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