I have received a few responses along this line and figured I would pick one and answer all of them. To determine if it is financial sustainable, I will take the information on design and implementation to create a configuration. This will let me establish the fixed and recurring costs required to set up the core and then incremental costs (fixed hardware and recurring leases) per broadcast area. Then I can calculate how many customers I will need per broadcast area to bring up a broadcast site. This will give me general startup costs and let me build a customer count / biling rate table. Once I have those numbers I can beat the pavement and find out what people will pay for my service and then I will know based on my table if there is a snowball's chance in hell of this working. Charles Bronson ________________________________ From: Brandon Kim <brandon.kim@brandontek.com> To: packetgeek@yahoo.com Sent: Tue, April 27, 2010 11:10:08 AM Subject: RE: Starting up a WiMAX ISP Interesting mission you have here. I'm in hudson valley region of NY. Have you done some research on the economics of this venture? Do you know if people would be willing to pay for higher speed internet access? Do you know if there are any gov't programs that can give you a grant to do this?
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:00:38 -0700 From: packetgeek@yahoo.com Subject: Starting up a WiMAX ISP To: nanog@nanog.org
Looking for advice...
I live in central / western New York state (think villages and farms). There are a good number of hills but no mountains. I have solid LAN experience and experience facing a smaller network to the Internet. I was network admin for a medium size enterprise network (I.e. design and implementation including LAN, Internet connectivity, VPN, routers, DNS, mail, webservers, physical servers, etc). I would like to build a local ISP that can serve high speed internet access to the more rural areas whose only option is dial up access, well away from the CO. It would also be nice to compete with the cable company and DSL for customers in the villages.
I have been researching information for design / implementation of WiMAX, equipment suppliers, contractors to help with installation of tower equipment and acquiring tower space, but have been coming up empty handed.
What resources are available to help me bridge the gap from where I am to what I need to know to get started and what specific technologies would you recommend I bone up on? I know beyond the WiMAX specific information, I will probably need to cozy up to BGP, maybe MPLS for traffic between the core and towers? Also do you have any suggestions on where I can find suppliers and service vendors in this field? Networks are my passion and am willing to dig in, but I need some direction.
Thanks for you help an insight.
Charles Bronson