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Comment by rrcaptain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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