>We just launched in our 2nd city; Scranton, PA. That's not... the Scranton, PA is it?
The electric city
Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#32Thanks for sharing this! As someone in a fiberless city (Amsterdam), with a monopolistic local provider that's unwilling to expand, this is inspiring.
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#33This is the real spirit of entrepreneurship. Hard work, learn quick, make mistakes, but get it done. With skin in the game rather than burning through investor money. I hope to read more of these posts, but I know Chris cannot afford to spend a lot of time writing them. Nevertheless I'm looking forward to reading part 3 when it is posted in 18 months. PS slight grammar nitpick: overtime != over time
Fixed the grammar :p
Also fix "I'm clearly a little bias against wireless"
Edit: and "genre's"
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#34I enjoyed reading the first part of this last year, and was thinking of it recently.
As someone who built a bootstrapped company from $40k/y revenue through $3.5M/year over 14 years, before we were shot in the head by our bank, I was thrilled to hear that you were doing something like this, but concerned over the many potholes (pun, I guess, intended) you were going to encounter. One of the biggest ones that was an eye opener for me early in starting and running Scalable was the rent seeking behavior of your suppliers. You wrote this as "Everyone wants a piece of the cake."
Yeah. That. It doesn't get better.
My comments for now are
1) beware of banks and debt instruments. If you can avoid personal guarantees on loans, then sure. Chances are they will say "no guarantee, no money". That money is extremely expensive to you. Avoid it like the plague.
2) beware "partners" and people/companies that claim to want to help you. Do due diligence, deeply, on any organization, including lawyers, accountants, etc. you might consider using. Most will waste your time.
3) hiring ... is ... critical. This is hard as a small co, as you generally can't find great people unless you have a pile of cash. You can try to turn who you can get into great people. But this only works if they are willing and able to learn.
4) Venture capital. Don't get me started.
I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything.
Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale.
I had a number of folks offer to buy the company. I was too stupid to realize that one should hit a number of singles and doubles to be able to get enough of a base to hit homers and grand slams.
Best of luck, and I've subscribed to the site now.
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#35So what is his competitive advantage over the incumbent providers - the cable company and the phone provider?
Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#36Thanks for sharing this! As someone in a fiberless city (Amsterdam), with a monopolistic local provider that's unwilling to expand, this is inspiring.
What happened to Citynet? They were supposed to wire the whole of Amsterdam with open access fiber. Did they stop after the Reggefiber/KPN acquisition?
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#37Great write-up. Great entrepreneurial tenacity. Would love more insight on the wireless challenges and how you tackle them? I wonder if a software monitoring app could detect increased noise and automate channel hopping. Surely that must exist -- on the other hand, you mentioned the vendors do everything to lower the BOM, so perhaps they are lazy and this software is needed. Could be a good OSS project.
So Mimosa, one of the hardware vendors we use, does actually have this built-in to their firmware. The issue is, from what I've seen, is that it hops around too much. It also moves to congested channels sometimes. I'm sure there's a way to perfect it, we just don't have the time at the moment (I also don't believe they provide full API access yet, so I'm not even sure if we can change it without creating an automated…
A founder of Mimosa (CTO Jaime) is a friend of mine. I'll try to direct him to this thread.
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#38As someone whose only entrepreneurial idea is to open an ISP, this is a great read. I'd like to know how the councilman and the director of operations helped out. Did they expedite permits, waive fees, or something else?
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#39So what is his competitive advantage over the incumbent providers - the cable company and the phone provider? Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...
If it's anything like the smaller ISP's in my area, his advantages are:
- Vastly superior customer service
- Simpler contracts; straight fee-for-service without any bullshit
- Likely better price overall
Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber
#40So what is his competitive advantage over the incumbent providers - the cable company and the phone provider? Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...
If it's anything like the smaller ISP's in my area, his advantages are: - Vastly superior customer service - Simpler contracts; straight fee-for-service without any bullshit - Likely better price overall
From my real-world testing, you shouldn't really expect to get more than 30-40 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up in a typical scenario. If you're competing with DSL,
For the most part, he isn’t competing with DSL. He is competing with cable. It looks like Comcast does service the area.
Another thing that stands out was that the article mentioned he was paying $1000 for a “From the link on what’s available in Scranton, it looks like Comcast also offers 1Gbps downloads.
He also said that he has 200 customers - mostly business.
I don’t see how this makes sense from an investment standpoint to offer service in an area that doesn’t appear to be underserved.
I’m definitely no fan of Comcast, but their business internet service is straightforward. If I’m running a business, the cost difference between Comcast and Loop is neglible.
Personally, I’m glad to have the much better, cheaper, gigabit service from AT&T, but I would grin and bare Comcast again if I had too.