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Comment by NetOpWibby | Hacker News Reader

> I get random cookies & care packages from people

I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.

Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.

Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.

I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.

I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.

We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)

Couldn’t have been anything older than a 386 as that was minimum spec even for Linux 1.0.

Seems I have the computers mixed up in my memory, it was definitely a IBM PS/2 Model 70 486. But our computer club were running some 8086 with a version of Linux before that as a router, think you had to compile the core yourself to get it working. Not to mention getting two different network cards running... My memory is fuzzy, wasn't me doing it, just watched the guy do it and bought him lunch :-)

Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.

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