Comment by montasaurus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by montasaurus | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Just because i courious;

> 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.

Really cool project!

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.

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