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
+ 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.
Don't forget that you're competing against rural ILECs that drink deeply from the well of USF funding. My local telco (Trumansburg) called me today to point out that I was paying $76/mo for a package of phone, 3Mb/382Kb DSL, voice mail and caller ID, but if I added in national long distance and a few other features, they'd give me the package rate of $66. They offer 3MB DSL all over their service area, even those long long rural runs. You think you can compete with that? Lightlink does OK against Verizon in Ithaca in the relatively dense area at the foot of Cayuga Lake, but with, as other people have noted, the owners doing nearly all the work. R's, John
John Levine wrote:
package rate of $66. They offer 3MB DSL all over their service area, even those long long rural runs. You think you can compete with that?
Of course what they offer over those "long long rural runs" and what they can actually provide are two different things. DSL performance decreases with distance rather dramatically..
Of course what they offer over those "long long rural runs" and what they can actually provide are two different things. DSL performance decreases with distance rather dramatically..
That's what I thought, but my friend out on the sheep farm in the next county says he gets 3Mb just like I do in the village three blocks from the CO. (Yes, he knows what he's talking about.) They must spend a lot on repeaters and concentrators. R's, John
On Wednesday 28 April 2010 03:13:24 John R. Levine wrote:
Of course what they offer over those "long long rural runs" and what they can actually provide are two different things. DSL performance decreases with distance rather dramatically..
That's what I thought, but my friend out on the sheep farm in the next county says he gets 3Mb just like I do in the village three blocks from the CO. (Yes, he knows what he's talking about.) They must spend a lot on repeaters and concentrators.
R's, John
There is a great deal of relevant experience here: http://www.wirelesscowboys.com/ -- The only thing worse than e-mail disclaimers...is people who send e-mail to lists complaining about them
Hi, Based on what the markets currently offers and what your potential customers need, you can figure out the packages that you could to sell (Internet, voip, vpn, guaranteed bandwidth...). This would give you the resources that should be considered per customer. It would also give you a hint to select the CPE (wifi, POTS, firewall...) Then, it is necessary to locate, physically the area with the greatest potential of getting customers. This would give an idea of where should the base stations be located, how many customers would be aggregated at one Base Station (having in mind how many customers will be connected concurrently) and how much downlink traffic is to be expected. In case you go for a model where the ASN-GW is centralized, all the traffic has to go from each base station to the ASN-GW. The backhauling could be done using Ethernet RF point-to-point link, re-using the mast where the Wimax antenna is. The ASN site, aggregates all the backhaul links into a switch, which then connects to the ASN-GW (BRAS like). This is where the AAA, (DHCP), DNS, NTP, NMS/EMS are also located. In my opinion, the critical point really resides on the radio part (license, authorization, legal complains, interferences...). Jean-Christophe VARAILLON -----Original Message----- From: Alexander Harrowell [mailto:a.harrowell@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 2:29 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Starting up a WiMAX ISP On Wednesday 28 April 2010 03:13:24 John R. Levine wrote:
Of course what they offer over those "long long rural runs" and what they can actually provide are two different things. DSL performance decreases with distance rather dramatically..
That's what I thought, but my friend out on the sheep farm in the next county says he gets 3Mb just like I do in the village three blocks from the CO. (Yes, he knows what he's talking about.) They must spend a lot on repeaters and concentrators.
R's, John
There is a great deal of relevant experience here: http://www.wirelesscowboys.com/ -- The only thing worse than e-mail disclaimers...is people who send e-mail to lists complaining about them
participants (6)
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Alexander Harrowell -
Bret Clark -
Charles Bronson -
John Levine -
John R. Levine
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Varaillon Jean Christophe