Start Your Own ISP

In practice, is this profitable?

Hi Graham, nice site, love you are giving back! I've also done a few Ubiquity design/install projects.

Couple of things I'd suggest. (take/or leave) You are clearly super knowledgeable in all the products you've mentioned, but it seems like the audience for this site is the newbie trying to break into the industry. With that in mind, I'd try to stick to a single product recommendation, and deep dive into it. For instance, in the pick a hardware platform you've listed four options, consider picking one, and if you feel the need to dump your extensive knowledge of the others, then perhaps do it in another section/addendum.

Consider hosting this where you can build a community. Github pages does this sort of thing for free.

Again, thanks and good luck with the site!

It can be. Often just barely so, especially if you are able to a bunch of the work on your own.

I had looked into doing something similar around 10 years ago. A couple of things I found useful that aren't mentioned:

Find a program that can measure the propagation of EM waves(for a WISP that's normally microwaves) Quite a few are listed at http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/qsl-review-propagation-sof...

I really liked the book Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks[1] if you're completely new to large scale wireless.

[1] http://www.ciscopress.com/store/deploying-license-free-wirel...

My very first real job at 16 was a WISP that served a small town in Arizona (~8k pop), by having a microwave tower on top of a hill in the middle of the town and just tying a few t1s in. The factor that got this WISP traction though was that we were doing family friendly filtering for customers, and in a religious town that went over pretty well. I left because I ended up doing too much of the work for $6 dollars an hour and I was just discovering "hacker culture" and started to disagree with the filtering we were doing.

I think my main question about starting a WISP these days is how the hell can I find out who to talk to about getting access to a certain tower and if there is fiber at the tower available for tie-in.

My grandparents live in a mountain village that gets lots of tourists in the summer, and it's in a valley with a large tower on top of one of the mountains that has los for the entire valley, but I can't seem to figure out who to ask about costs/contracts etc. With the tourist influx though I could easily see it being fairly profitable, and there is no other ISP option besides sat and frontiernet.