Starting an Internet Service Provider

Except it's not - for 200/20 at those prices the GP must be talking about a Virgin Media line, and they run their own cables. The increased competition between providers probably contributes to driving down prices to just above the point of profitability, but its not responsible for the infrastructure in this case.

I've been building WISPs in the US (including Texas) for about 14 years now. Happy to chat, email in my profile.

I'm the type of person who can lose hours reading stories on sites like Jargon File, Folklore.org, Raymond Chen's blog about MS internals, and even more modern internet history stories. And as I wouldn't limit my search on areas to get involved in muni ISPs to my own country, a global perspective would be interesting to read.

The answer to some of those questions are complex. I was trying to keep the length of this post to a minimum, so I decided to keep that information out, but I'll try to provide some of the details you asked about.

The cost of equipment depends on the installation. If we use Ubiquiti sectors and CPE's, the sectors run about $500/each and each CPE is around $130. I don't think we have a sector with more than 6 clients on it and I don't think I'd be willing to put more than 10 on one, depending on the channel and signal, each antenna has around 250 Mbps of capacity. So if we have 6 clients on a sector, that's about $213/subscriber.

Most of our business customers are on PtP radios. I use Mimosa B5-lite's for those, which are $300/set.

Some of our customers are in properties in which we already have equipment, so the cost there depends on how many customers are in the same building. I'll typically run the CPE to a switch and then branch out to customers from there. Let's say that the property has 3 subscribers and I used a Mimosa B5-lite to the property. Add $300 for a switch and we're at around $200/subscriber.

I'd probably say that a client, on average, costs around $250 to get setup.

Every antenna and switch in our PoP is connected to a UPS system; I have one large 3U UPS and a few stand-alone desktop UPS's. They probably total around $2,500. We use a small fraction of our available bandwidth; that's not a concern. What is a concern is the spectrum available per antenna, which is why I said I would not put more than 10 clients on an antenna.

I'll write another post about the cost of fiber.

By way of answering, let me recount a short story for you.

It takes place during the very first time I visited Kampala (the capital of Uganda). It was about 3 years before I had started working in the ISP/telecom space in Africa. This particular trip was soccer-specific (I was working on the team that delivered one of the big trans-national African tournaments' games on television), thus the non-ISP nature of it.

We arrive at our hotel, having driven just under an hour from Entebbe to Kampala. It's fairly pleasant, albeit a tad humid (it's mid-day and near the equator after all; 36C and >=70% humidity - not the worst). There's a group of around 30 of us that now need to check in... this always takes a little while.

So, everything goes on. You loaf around the hotel reception until it's your point in the queue, grab some water now and then when you can. Finally, you're standing at the front desk, starting your process of checkin.

You read off your name... the person behind the counter finds you in the list (of fortunately mostly checked-off people - yay alphabet precedence!), and starts doing some stuff on the front desk computer. At which point you glance over to said desktop and notice the UPS jacked into the UPS jacked into the UPS (yes, three) jacked into the computer. You idly inquire about this. The response is "oh, yeah, the other ones died with all the power outages".

Not a joke, as it turns out. While you're doing your checking, the building experiences a brownout twice.

Years later, you get there for a totally different reason. Time (literal years) has passed. And during setup of some equipment (here, I'm skipping about two days' worth of time), you find that the reason your laptop screen kept dimming and your DC UPS' kept beeping.... is because you're getting such major voltage swings on the building feed that everything is going over-or-under-voltage.

This is daily life (in many parts of Africa). It isn't a thing to fight against. It just is. You take it, and try to do your utter best. You try to deliver your utter best.

And if you just push hard enough (and, imo, if you're really, really lucky) you maybe get somewhere with it!