Starting an ISP is relatively easy... get an uplink, some rack space somewhere, a router, hire a smart high school kid for tech support, and you are off to the races.
The really hard part is last-mile connectivity. You are either on someone elses lines (cable, DSL, etc), dealing with NIMBYs to bury your own lines, or working around line of site to do wireless. It isn't clear that you've solved this problem (or even from your website what you are using for last mile).
It's largely an infrastructure business at the end of the day, and not without its challenges. The real problem is that there are people willing to take on these challenges, but they get stuck as early as the "get an uplink" part of that process.
Just digging into that piece, there are a lot of decisions. Burstable or dedicated? Why are they billing based on 95th percentile? How much bandwidth should I budget per subscriber? The typical uplink quote we've seen has 6 different tables with like 80 different prices on it. If you've bought it before, you know what the tradeoffs are. If you haven't, that's a steep hill to climb just for step 1 of the process.
We deploy fixed wireless here in SF, mainly 60GHz and 5.8GHz. They require line of sight, but something like Baicells could be a good fit for areas where that's more of an issue. It's not just the NIMBYs when you go to hang/bury your own lines, the incumbents will box you out on power poles and generally make things difficult for you.
Thats like saying you are helping people start a taxi business because they get confused when it comes to warranty options on buying their first car. If they don't have the fortitude to work out a transit contract, the ISP business might not be for them.
I think it would be better to frame your business as a franchise opportunity. At the end of the day it really sounds like your customers are a capital source.
I don't think of it as a question of fortitude as much as opportunity cost. We're looking for operators that would be successful running other types of businesses instead. We want them to choose the ISP business over one that they might be more familiar with. No doubt they could come to understand a transit contract and all the other components, but it's frictions like those that reduce the number of people who decide being an ISP is the right business for them. If you can 1) find customers and 2) provide a great service experience, we want you selling internet! You can spend a lifetime getting good at those two things. We'd rather our operators do that, and we can handle the networking for them.
> We deploy fixed wireless here in SF, mainly 60GHz and 5.8GHz.
That would be probably not possible in germany where everything is highly regulated, right?
If, there is a relative fresh projekt around here in germany, where a guy bought an old horsefarm and creates small areas where different individuals can do their stuff (cooking, gardening, a music studie open to use for musicians who cant afford a real studio). This guys really struggle to get good permanent internet connection - but they recently got visited by the CCC so i guess they will hear from you guys and contact you if they like.
Frequencies are heavily regulated in the US as well. There are a handful of public bands, but anything else requires FCC licensing to use. Broadcast power is also restricted.
Of course, Germany could still be more restrictive, I don't know the law there! But there must be a fairly simple licensing path for some microwave bands, or nobody would be able to sell wireless routers. This is the same general class of equipment, so unless there's too much restriction on broadcast power to connect at kilometer+ ranges (with a focused directional antenna, rather than the broadcast antenna of a router!) there should be a way to make it work.
The hard part doesn’t scale. Takes boots on the ground geographically to assess what’s possible and implement what’s cost effective (copper or fixed wireless, maybe fiber if its greenfield and you have cheap trenching capabilities).
thanks for sharing! out of curiosity, how do people typically trench today? which companies do you consider on the leading edge in terms of trenching price and technology?
Your local construction or electrical contractors are usually best suited for this work, using something like a ditch witch or trencher. This isn’t cutting edge work, just a trade.
thank you for sharing. just to be clear, you're saying there is no nationwide company/brand for trenching? ISPs like comcast and verizon just use local contractors/companies?
We just moved on to a home that was very recently built on agricultural land. Comcast had fiber at the end of our 300-foot driveway, but they wanted $10-$15 per foot to trench in order to start a cable internet (DOCSIS 3.1) service. They were simply subcontracting the work out to a local company. I told them I would trench instead. They then had the company drop off 400-feet of conduit. I rented a trencher ($200) for the day and hand-dug what the machine could not deal with (mud, trees, etc). After I was done, the subcontractor came back to finish the end points. They had a machine and process that was virtually identical to my own.
I'm surprised there are not mini boring bots. Maybe in a few years.
To my knowledge, yes. Whenever I’ve had Comcast, Verizon, or another provider pull a last mile of fiber, it’s been done by a local contractor (my experience is limited to Illinois, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin) with the upstream provider coordinating the turnup.
thanks, final question if you don't mind. :) do you know how much the average trenching job costs or how long it takes (order of magnitude)? $10K and days, $100K and weeks, or ...?
Comcast recently pulled fiber down a main road (about half a mile?), then about 150 feet along poles down a residential road, then trenched about 15 feet beside my driveway. It took a couple of months to get permitting to run it along the main road, but maybe half a day to actually run it. It took half a day to run it on poles along the residential road, and 6-7 hours (four guys) to trench 15 feet beside my driveway. Plus another half a day (one guy) to terminate the fiber in my basement, and another half day (one guy) to install the CPE.
I suppose it's a lot simpler these days compared to when ISPs provided e-mail, news, shell accounts, web hosting among other things...
That said, I wouldn't say it's "easy." You still need to track your customers through their full lifecycle with you, you still need to provision/audit both locally and in concert with CLECs and you still need to monitor, backup and keep everything up.
Moreover, if you plan to scale out in any way, you need to be principled, lest you end up with enormous flat files filled with bespoke configs that no-one even understands.
The really hard part is last-mile connectivity. You are either on someone elses lines (cable, DSL, etc), dealing with NIMBYs to bury your own lines, or working around line of site to do wireless. It isn't clear that you've solved this problem (or even from your website what you are using for last mile).