4 ms·

What type of profit potential is there to doing this? Seems like good stable income, but I also see lots of downsides with literally not knowing how anything wo

by Exuma 5y ago

What type of profit potential is there to doing this? Seems like good stable income, but I also see lots of downsides with literally not knowing how anything works (and not being an engineer). There would be an awful lot of new information to learn, so the profit potential would really need to be there.

walrus01 5y ago
That would vary wildly by geographical location and whether it's some place that has no WISP at all right now, population density, competition, terrain and tree cover, number of houses, etc. I'm skeptical about the idea of starting a very small WISP right now, one could easily spend $40-50,000 on basic infrastructure for a small area and not be able to compete in nines of reliability/uptime and speeds with Starlink.
- calgoo 5y ago
  Exactly, you need to have access to tall buildings / towers etc with fiber. The cost of putting a couple of antennas on a tower can basically eat up any profit you would get. You are also competing with LTE/5G, and one storm can wipe out half your infrastructure in an afternoon.
  - Exuma 5y ago
    Heh, I can't imagine that feeling when you have really no idea what you're doing, you have 50 paying customers, and then all your equipment goes down. This sounds nightmarish unless you are some sort of electrical engineer
    - walrus01 5y ago
      As a one-man WISP responsible for everything at the physical level and the logical/IP configuration of the network, monitoring systems, billing systems, customer support systems etc you are also trapped in a personal hell of never being able to go on vacation and on-call 24x7x365. There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        My first company was an ISP. There were 4 of us. We were around 19. No business experience. No networking experience. How hard could it be, right? I configured my first router by calling our provider and saying we'd set things up but something was wrong, and having them echo to me what they did on their side so I could "check" our side - they charged for the setup, but this way we got it for free. We literally lived in the office for the first year, and one of my most entertaining experiences was answering the phone at 2am on a Sunday morning and the person on the other end expressing surprise that someone answered - they'd just called out of sheer desperation and expected it to ring forever. Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorising us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package - something the person talking to him found out call by call, while the rest of us tried to not audibly laugh, because surely nobody could be that stupid? (a "learning experience" - it was how I came to understand why support people ask all those really obvious "stupid" questions. I can't make up my mind if all the network issues were the worst part, or if the support calls were. This was 26 years ago, and I have just about gotten over the soul-sucking parts of it by now. I even contemplated setting up a local ISP again... I don't know why.
        marcus0x62 5y ago
        > Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorizing us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package I worked at a local mom and pop ISP at around the same time, probably a few years later. Those sorts of customer calls were the best (after they were resolved of course.) * One guy would call at 2 or 3 AM and scream into our voicemail "Internet's DOWN! FIX IT NOW!!!!!". His wife would call the next day and apologize. * One time, someone called irate that their dialup service wasn't working. He called the number we gave him, and all he heard "was a bunch of ringing and static". After several minutes we figured out he was dialing the modem bank from a telephone and expecting to use the Internet without a computer. He did not own a computer, and was quite upset we had not told him he needed one... * It took two or three hours one time to figure out why someone couldn't connect. Helpfully, they figured it out themselves -- they were entering "the letter zero, not the number zero". * A guy called up one time wanting to tell us about an interstellar propulsion device he developed (which also, of course, could cure cancer if the 'magnetic field' was reversed.) I suggested he call the Jet Propulsion Labs and gave him the number. For me, the support calls were always the worst and I was very glad when the company got big enough that I no longer had to regularly take calls (although the ones I did get were the worst of the worst.)
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I once lost internet for a week when our WISP provider's base station went down. We tried calling his company for days, and he only came to fix it when we found his cellphone number and accosted him personally. Thankfully we use Starlink now.

by Exuma 5y ago

walrus01 5y ago

That would vary wildly by geographical location and whether it's some place that has no WISP at all right now, population density, competition, terrain and tree cover, number of houses, etc. I'm skeptical about the idea of starting a very small WISP right now, one could easily spend $40-50,000 on basic infrastructure for a small area and not be able to compete in nines of reliability/uptime and speeds with Starlink.

calgoo 5y ago
Exactly, you need to have access to tall buildings / towers etc with fiber. The cost of putting a couple of antennas on a tower can basically eat up any profit you would get. You are also competing with LTE/5G, and one storm can wipe out half your infrastructure in an afternoon.
- Exuma 5y ago
  Heh, I can't imagine that feeling when you have really no idea what you're doing, you have 50 paying customers, and then all your equipment goes down. This sounds nightmarish unless you are some sort of electrical engineer
  - walrus01 5y ago
    As a one-man WISP responsible for everything at the physical level and the logical/IP configuration of the network, monitoring systems, billing systems, customer support systems etc you are also trapped in a personal hell of never being able to go on vacation and on-call 24x7x365. There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      My first company was an ISP. There were 4 of us. We were around 19. No business experience. No networking experience. How hard could it be, right? I configured my first router by calling our provider and saying we'd set things up but something was wrong, and having them echo to me what they did on their side so I could "check" our side - they charged for the setup, but this way we got it for free. We literally lived in the office for the first year, and one of my most entertaining experiences was answering the phone at 2am on a Sunday morning and the person on the other end expressing surprise that someone answered - they'd just called out of sheer desperation and expected it to ring forever. Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorising us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package - something the person talking to him found out call by call, while the rest of us tried to not audibly laugh, because surely nobody could be that stupid? (a "learning experience" - it was how I came to understand why support people ask all those really obvious "stupid" questions. I can't make up my mind if all the network issues were the worst part, or if the support calls were. This was 26 years ago, and I have just about gotten over the soul-sucking parts of it by now. I even contemplated setting up a local ISP again... I don't know why.
      - marcus0x62 5y ago
        > Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorizing us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package I worked at a local mom and pop ISP at around the same time, probably a few years later. Those sorts of customer calls were the best (after they were resolved of course.) * One guy would call at 2 or 3 AM and scream into our voicemail "Internet's DOWN! FIX IT NOW!!!!!". His wife would call the next day and apologize. * One time, someone called irate that their dialup service wasn't working. He called the number we gave him, and all he heard "was a bunch of ringing and static". After several minutes we figured out he was dialing the modem bank from a telephone and expecting to use the Internet without a computer. He did not own a computer, and was quite upset we had not told him he needed one... * It took two or three hours one time to figure out why someone couldn't connect. Helpfully, they figured it out themselves -- they were entering "the letter zero, not the number zero". * A guy called up one time wanting to tell us about an interstellar propulsion device he developed (which also, of course, could cure cancer if the 'magnetic field' was reversed.) I suggested he call the Jet Propulsion Labs and gave him the number. For me, the support calls were always the worst and I was very glad when the company got big enough that I no longer had to regularly take calls (although the ones I did get were the worst of the worst.)
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I once lost internet for a week when our WISP provider's base station went down. We tried calling his company for days, and he only came to fix it when we found his cellphone number and accosted him personally. Thankfully we use Starlink now.