Hacker News Reader

Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

I helped start a few ISPs in the late 90's, early 2000's... Is it really a good business these days? I figured it's low margin and hard to compete with the Comcasts and Verizons of the world. There's one fixed wireless ISP I know of regionally that is a public company, and they're bleeding money.

View on HN

It's gotta be. My brother and I rent commercial space as a workshop on a main stretch of road in a pretty big midwest city. I asked a few nearby businesses who they use for wifi, they all said AT&T.

So I go onto AT&T's website and the cheapest option they had was 2mb service for 44$ a month AND a year commitment. I checked 4 or 5 more ISPs and they all had the same or worse deals. I ended up buying a hotspot from T-Mobile.

Now that I'm reading about this though.. If I can create a wireless ISP that can do better than 20$ a MB for just a mile or two of the business boulevard I'm on and it costs about ~10k I'm going to do it. Time to research I guess.

We service some "DSL dead zones" like that...it's crazy to see the prices people are forced into paying. We had one customer that was paying over $100/mo for low single digit Mbps before they switched.

Thankfully it's gotten a lot better since then. The RF tech has improved dramatically and bulk bandwidth costs are much more reasonable. Is it Proxim?

I'm right outside of Boston. Towerstream is the ISP I was speaking of... they always seem to be losing money.

I've worked at a few ISPs in Australia. There are still huge efficiency gains to be made, especially on the customer service side of the business which accounts for 70+% of the labour cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com