Comment by blueblisters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blueblisters | Hacker News Reader

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Hey this is a great idea, but I have a few questions/comments:

- The website looks fine to me (it's not egregious like the other commenters say), but it might be worth making the landing page clearer.

- Are the PoPs meant to be purchased by retail investors? $20,000 seems a bit steep for most people to invest in. It's also too small for most institutional investors. Do you guarantee returns for eternity? This sounds like a "too good to be true" proposition. Why not package multiple PoPs into a larger financial instrument so that returns are more even, and then sell them to institutional investors? Lambda school has taken a creative approach to bundling ISAs: https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-...

- What are the parameters for your FSO technology? How well does it work in rain/smog and other environmental conditions? What wavelength are you using?

- last mile is tricky because you still have to invest in infrastructure and marketing to the end user. Does $20k really cover that?

Either way, I love the idea, just skeptical about the economics and the technology. Hoping to hear more about you guys in the future!

OP here. Thanks so much for the questions.

- The PoPs are meant to be purchased by retail investors, we've sold 35 of them so far. We're offering it as a franchisee agreement for a period of 6 years with a 70-30 revenue share split with minimum guaranteed revenue.

- Regarding the FSOs, we've been serving thousands of live customers for the last 9 months off the FSOs and have greater than 99% uptime through rain, hail and heavy winds. FSO has come a long way in terms of reliability and throughput since the early days. We're using the 1535nm - 1565nm wavelength.

- We've wired thousands of public wifi hotspots as well as large buildings and campuses over the last 3 years and a have a really clear deployment strategy and team in place.

- Yes, the $20k covers the cost of the lasers, deployment, sales and management of the service and customers. We've put in a huge amount of effort over the last 3 years to bring costs down by using a lot commodity components for routers, switches, etc.

- The $20k price point hasn't been much of an issue so far, but happy to hear more feedback on that. We're thinking about setting aside a few PoPs where a group of people can pool money to purchase one. Would love to hear your thoughts on that.

> - The $20k price point hasn't been much of an issue so far, but happy to hear more feedback on that. We're thinking about setting aside a few PoPs where a group of people can pool money to purchase one. Would love to hear your thoughts on that.

I think the biggest question for the casual retail investor would be how well will a given PoP perform. If there is high revenue variability between PoPs due to housing density, per capita income, etc., you will start facing disgruntled investors pretty soon. The other issue with smaller investment size is that the "management fees" are likely to be higher - you need to address more questions and concerns from individuals about your product. Pooling PoPs might solve both of these issues elegantly with a more complicated financial instrument.

Edit: I also noticed you used the term "franchisee" agreement. I think this might be slightly misleading to investors because franchise owners generally have a lot of control over aspects of the business, whereas what you're selling is a more traditional financial instrument.

We've got a live network with thousands of users across the city and have got 3 years of experience in this market, so we've got good sense of the expected performance per PoP. Furthermore, we also offer minimum guaranteed revenue to PoP owners in case a region takes a little while to grow.

Regarding the use of the word franchisee, we've actually had a really counter-intuitive lesson while selling the PoPs. Initially we always referred to it in financial terms but what we found was that buyers were using the word franchisee themselves and preferred the term. It makes sense if you look at it from an absentee landlord share-cropping view, except in our case, we provide a fully managed service where you don't have to actually do any work.

We've set aside 5 PoPs for people that want to be part of a pool in case the $20k price tag is too high for them. We've just started to see some traction on that, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

Honestly, 99% uptime is pretty crap for an ISP. That’s three full days of downtime over 9 months.

Aren’t customers complaining constantly?

If you figure the outages are from rainstorms or temporary obstructions of the laser links and only last 3 hours, that is one 3 hour outage every 12.5 days. I would drop my ISP pretty fast if they had that poor uptime.

Hi OP, Good luck with this. I am very interested and wondering about what is after 6 years?: - The PoPs are meant to be purchased by retail investors, we've sold 35 of them so far. We're offering it as a franchisee agreement for a period of 6 years with a 70-30 revenue share split with minimum guaranteed revenue.

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