 radiowebstBrian Webster
join:2009-02-02
Cooperstown, NY | reply to jameswade
Re: This is a great effort, but WISPs do need to be careful. My take on the topic of competition is this. If your market is large enough you will always have the threat of competition from various sources. They will more than likely have some clueless marketing department that would just look at raw numbers for households or population counts and say it meets their criteria to build. If you are lucky and they have a smart marketing department, they will also look to see who already has built in this market. If the numbers are already marginal they may pass knowing that there will be little to no chance of making profit based on the fact there will only be so many possible customers and then they will be split among competition.
If you have your network and business out there for all to see the competition's marketing department may see it as well and possibly abandon building a marginal market. Now they could always be stubborn and build anyway creating grief for you. Thing is, if they are apt to do this, advertising your network coverage would not make any difference anyway. As far as the days of people building wireless just to interfere, I think with the economy the way it is, that is much less likely to happen. With the newer wireless gear you can work around most of those situations.
I guess what I am trying to say is hiding your network in fear of competition also hurts your own business because your potential customers don't know you are there either. |
