I am going to start an ISP
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@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@dustinb3403 said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@dustinb3403 said in I am going to start an ISP:
If wireless only, how are you going to be able to ensure that they can be serviced? You can't expect them to build a tower on their residence. .
WISPs generally do LoS surveys. It's not a new thing for the industry.
No I get that, but you still need an antenna on the residence.
Which if it's only so many feet tall likely won't work.
So the question is are most of the homes in the area relatively clear to be able to see the planned tower?
It's Texas. So most likely a large number of homes will be in LoS of any high point. This isn't the Adirondacks or the Catskills.
Yup. West Texas, this would be a piece of cake as there is hardly nothing out there to get in the way. East Texas, Trees maybe go up 30 ft and the land is generally flat with some hills and valleys.
What area of West Texas? I am in Midland/Odessa area.
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@brianlittlejohn said in I am going to start an ISP:
@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@dustinb3403 said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@dustinb3403 said in I am going to start an ISP:
If wireless only, how are you going to be able to ensure that they can be serviced? You can't expect them to build a tower on their residence. .
WISPs generally do LoS surveys. It's not a new thing for the industry.
No I get that, but you still need an antenna on the residence.
Which if it's only so many feet tall likely won't work.
So the question is are most of the homes in the area relatively clear to be able to see the planned tower?
It's Texas. So most likely a large number of homes will be in LoS of any high point. This isn't the Adirondacks or the Catskills.
Yup. West Texas, this would be a piece of cake as there is hardly nothing out there to get in the way. East Texas, Trees maybe go up 30 ft and the land is generally flat with some hills and valleys.
What area of West Texas? I am in Midland/Odessa area.
I've never gone through Midland/Odessa, but between Abilene and Big Spring, then from Guadalupe to almost El Paso. I lived in Carlsbad, NM at the time.
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@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
Some tips...
1.) Never even think about building a tower. Make a deal for a building top or get with American Tower (http://www.americantower.com) if you cant get high enough.
Tower building and maintenance is a whole other business, any tower would end up costing 3 times what you are talking about.
2.) You will register with IANA as an autonomous network and get your own IP address range assignment. Its illegal to resell internet from Spectrum, etc
3.) Plenty of Tier 1 internet to contract with to your main tower site. Start with 2 connections, they will be redundant as your ip range will be hooked to a BGP. Any teir 1 internet provider will gladly walk you through all this to get your business
4.) Make sure your first site is as HIGH as possible.
5.) If you are going to bootstrap it (which is what UBNT is all about) you really should be thinking about any capital investments out of the wireless equipment.
And I would add to this, almost certainly you can lease a space in a tall building and get roof access, sometimes just for trading internet access to the building manager if they have offices on premise. You can also sell internet down through said building, link backhaul to nearby buildings and do the same.
I was going to mention that. One of the WISPs does that around here they paid for the backbone into the building and the lease is "free" for them.
first WISP I started circa 2001 we used water towers in a rural area as a starting point. We got it free just because the whole area only had dial up and the city couldnt get Time Warner to bring cable internet int.
The second time we were on top of the tallest building in a 60 mile radius with out initial office lease. Small data center in the building.
American Tower has been crucial for residential expansions. We built a tower site on a government/school leased land and it was a nightmare.
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@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
1.) Never even think about building a tower. Make a deal for a building top or get with American Tower (http://www.americantower.com) if you cant get high enough.
Dude, thank you.
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@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
1.) Never even think about building a tower. Make a deal for a building top or get with American Tower (http://www.americantower.com) if you cant get high enough.
Dude, thank you.
No problem, also you should get starting on this for your IP address range. First time around is a long process...
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@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
Some tips...
1.) Never even think about building a tower. Make a deal for a building top or get with American Tower (http://www.americantower.com) if you cant get high enough.
Tower building and maintenance is a whole other business, any tower would end up costing 3 times what you are talking about.
2.) You will register with IANA as an autonomous network and get your own IP address range assignment. Its illegal to resell internet from Spectrum, etc
3.) Plenty of Tier 1 internet to contract with to your main tower site. Start with 2 connections, they will be redundant as your ip range will be hooked to a BGP. Any teir 1 internet provider will gladly walk you through all this to get your business
4.) Make sure your first site is as HIGH as possible.
5.) If you are going to bootstrap it (which is what UBNT is all about) you really should be thinking about any capital investments out of the wireless equipment.
And I would add to this, almost certainly you can lease a space in a tall building and get roof access, sometimes just for trading internet access to the building manager if they have offices on premise. You can also sell internet down through said building, link backhaul to nearby buildings and do the same.
I was going to mention that. One of the WISPs does that around here they paid for the backbone into the building and the lease is "free" for them.
first WISP I started circa 2001 we used water towers in a rural area as a starting point. We got it free just because the whole area only had dial up and the city couldnt get Time Warner to bring cable internet int.
The second time we were on top of the tallest building in a 60 mile radius with out initial office lease. Small data center in the building.
American Tower has been crucial for residential expansions. We built a tower site on a government/school leased land and it was a nightmare.
So you've been around this block a time or two, huh?
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@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
Vultr will host the uCRM, UNMS, FreePBX (internally to company only), and email (again, internal to company only
Don't host your public website, PBX and email on the same provider as your back end. If VULTR has an outage you don't want to have ALL communication systems go down hard.
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@storageninja said in I am going to start an ISP:
@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
Vultr will host the uCRM, UNMS, FreePBX (internally to company only), and email (again, internal to company only
Don't host your public website, PBX and email on the same provider as your back end. If VULTR has an outage you don't want to have ALL communication systems go down hard.
You can mitigate nearly all of that by splitting them between Vultr locations. But that still leaves account exposure primarily (I need to do a video on that!!)
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I recommend mixing Vultr and Linode.
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@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
@coliver said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
Some tips...
1.) Never even think about building a tower. Make a deal for a building top or get with American Tower (http://www.americantower.com) if you cant get high enough.
Tower building and maintenance is a whole other business, any tower would end up costing 3 times what you are talking about.
2.) You will register with IANA as an autonomous network and get your own IP address range assignment. Its illegal to resell internet from Spectrum, etc
3.) Plenty of Tier 1 internet to contract with to your main tower site. Start with 2 connections, they will be redundant as your ip range will be hooked to a BGP. Any teir 1 internet provider will gladly walk you through all this to get your business
4.) Make sure your first site is as HIGH as possible.
5.) If you are going to bootstrap it (which is what UBNT is all about) you really should be thinking about any capital investments out of the wireless equipment.
And I would add to this, almost certainly you can lease a space in a tall building and get roof access, sometimes just for trading internet access to the building manager if they have offices on premise. You can also sell internet down through said building, link backhaul to nearby buildings and do the same.
I was going to mention that. One of the WISPs does that around here they paid for the backbone into the building and the lease is "free" for them.
first WISP I started circa 2001 we used water towers in a rural area as a starting point. We got it free just because the whole area only had dial up and the city couldnt get Time Warner to bring cable internet int.
The second time we were on top of the tallest building in a 60 mile radius with out initial office lease. Small data center in the building.
American Tower has been crucial for residential expansions. We built a tower site on a government/school leased land and it was a nightmare.
So you've been around this block a time or two, huh?
Had given serious thought to a 3rd round trip but, as I predicted, Spectrum halves pricing and doubled speeds around the tri-state. I think the more rural you are the better your chances of success are.
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@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
I would try to keep the business itself as paperless as possible, but would give the sub the option either way.
This one is simple. Charge $5 more a month for paper billing and outsource it to someone who does paper billing.
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@storageninja said in I am going to start an ISP:
@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
I would try to keep the business itself as paperless as possible, but would give the sub the option either way.
This one is simple. Charge $5 more a month for paper billing and outsource it to someone who does paper billing.
You need an avatar.
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@storageninja said in I am going to start an ISP:
@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:
I would try to keep the business itself as paperless as possible, but would give the sub the option either way.
This one is simple. Charge $5 more a month for paper billing and outsource it to someone who does paper billing.
You should check out zoho invoicing, they offer paper service. There stuff has come a LONG way. I was recently looking at using stripe.com and zoho for payments.
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Zoho is generally quite nice.
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@bigbear said in I am going to start an ISP:
3.) Plenty of Tier 1 internet to contract with to your main tower site. Start with 2 connections, they will be redundant as your ip range will be hooked to a BGP. Any teir 1 internet provider will gladly walk you through all this to get your business
You are joking, right? Level3 used to basically tell you to go @#$@ yourself if you don't know eBGP and you call them to do a link turn up.
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@scottalanmiller said in I am going to start an ISP:
You can mitigate nearly all of that by splitting them between Vultr locations. But that still leaves account exposure primarily (I need to do a video on that!!)
I've seen Cloud Providers and ISP's f*** [moderated] up their external BGP announcements and get black holed by everyone they peer with....
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Have you thought about IPv6? Why start a millennium behind?
Just a thought!
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@brianlittlejohn said in I am going to start an ISP:
What area of West Texas? I am in Midland/Odessa area
In Rocksprings, I can get 20Mbps down in my west pasture by the sinkhole on 4G. Cell providers are going to increasingly threaten WISPs.
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@storageninja said in I am going to start an ISP:
@brianlittlejohn said in I am going to start an ISP:
What area of West Texas? I am in Midland/Odessa area
In Rocksprings, I can get 20Mbps down in my west pasture by the sinkhole on 4G. Cell providers are going to increasingly threaten WISPs.
Turn left at the 3rd cow, straight ahead down'yonder?
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@storageninja said in I am going to start an ISP:
@scottalanmiller said in I am going to start an ISP:
You can mitigate nearly all of that by splitting them between Vultr locations. But that still leaves account exposure primarily (I need to do a video on that!!)
I've seen Cloud Providers and ISP's fuck up their external BGP announcements and get black holed by everyone they peer with....
Verizon, Sprint and Cogent were all very helpful 10 to 15 years ago. Havent really needed that kind of help since then.
But if you do get shit from anyone tell them to #$%#$% off because you will figure it all out if you stick to it. Like anything else.
