Industry Forums > Wireless Service Providers > Initial investment for setting up ISP

Initial investment for setting up ISP

$10 million dollars....

Make the check out to "Jim Bouse".

.... Seriously .... How are we supposed to help you with your question if you don't give us any idea of the area you are trying to cover, the equipment, the speeds, your geography, etc....

I started my WISP on about $5000 (but I have a full-time job to pay the bills as the WISP grows). I am slowly (6 Months) getting to the point where the WISP is paying my personal account back.

reply to Telecomnet
»WISP Forum README
--
»www.wirelessdatanet.net

reply to Telecomnet
You need at least enough to get enough subscribers on line in 6 months.

You really really need a consultant to help you with this. Asking about a several hundred thousand dollar invetment in a public forum is a poor idea.

reply to Telecomnet
Yea it's a really broad question based on so many things. I've heard ppl fail a wisp with 50 grand, yet I started mine with a thousand bucks and succeeded.
--
OptionsDSL Wireless Internet
»www.optionsdsl.ca

reply to Telecomnet
Expect to spend money like a "fire hose"...and get it back like a "eyedropper", especially if you're starting from scratch.

reply to Telecomnet
Lets see... $145 for two Linksys routers, $8.44 for 2 tuppeware boxes (to house the routers outside) and existing DSL connection... so..... I suspect $150.00 if you get the tupperware on sale! 4 yrs later, 4K customers + and its self sustaining, never borrowed a dime. I think I might have tossed in another $500 or so for a couple of Engenius radios, but all the same, and tupperware was actually "ZipLok" brand.. still have them

So can be done... but YOU might wish to eat during that growth phase, so perhaps a few more bucks in the bank will help.

Kraft Dinner & Inlaws

reply to Telecomnet
We started ours with ~$8,000 and about 4 servers, 2 desktop's and 5 switch's. One netgear managed switch, 3 cisco ios switch's and 2 hp procurves and all of this I had acquired from ebay over the years.

That said 2 years later and 86 subscribers with 12 sites later and im still not making any money just paying the company's bills and putting it all back into the company.

I don't expect to make any money for another 3-5 years, It is VERY expensive to do things right and as you grow the cost to do things right also grows. I am anticipating running out of bandwidth on 2 key backhaul's and needing to bring in more ethernet circuit's from bell to key towers within 1-2 years at present growth.

Also don't screw around, Do things right and do things once. And don't try to do things that you can't offer it just makes you look like a joke and gives all unlicensed wireless a bad name.

I started my wisp because the wisp I previously worked for refused to do things right and insisted that everything was done on a shoe string budget with equipment from the local office depot.

I kid you not they refused to buy a managed switch, if it wasn't linksys or dlink and featureless they wanted nothing to do with it.

When shit hit the fan and their 6 year old tranzeo backhauls started to fail and began to require hourly reboots to keep them up and over 300 people had internet down more then it was up.

I was told to lie to the subscribers faces and tell them that the issue was at their house or with their routers and my boss's told me that we were never getting the equipment to I needed to fix it there mess they called a network. (all they cared about is if they were getting payments from people not if the internet worked right).

Before that even on the best of day's there was tcp congestion control was kicking in during the peak hours across most of the access points, All critical backhauls and most of there internet connections. During the off hours it was even kicking on and off on most of the major infrastructure.

There internet connections at the pop's that fed tower sites ranged from a 2meg adsl line running 30 peoples internet that was marketed as 2 megabits per second down to the subscribers. To 50 meg down 2 up cable lines with 200+ people on each behind nat. (They also had ml-ppp adsl that I had setup with 12 lines in one pop and 4 in another all overloaded but they at least had public addressing).

They were foolish and offered unlimited to people wirelessly. They had subscribers with as much usage as 600GB/mo, the top 10% were all over 150GB/mo. (excluding the top users on the 2meg adsl line). They had one access point with 30 subscribers on it that had 2 subscribers using more then 50% of the bandwidth 24/7 to infringe copyrights.

I had tried from day 1 when I was there to get them to get a 100meg Ethernet circuit and consolidate the 3 pop's and 19 separate unreliable Residential/Small Business internet connections into one. But I was met with only hostility from the owners regarding that as they thought the price of doing business in this field properly was not worth it and preferred to keep the costs as low as humanly possible to maximize profits.

Feed up with their bullshit and completely wrong attitude of just trying to make stuff sort of work for free or near free cost in ways that violate all best practices for networking and radio.

I started my own wisp and vowed to never drop a packet, to always have at least 20% capacity free on all parts of my network during all hours so congestion control will never kick in and To always deliver on my advertised speed and to never compromise on network design or implementation to save a buck.

Ive had to suspend signup's many times to address capacity issues so far until they were resolved. (I consider it an issue if its over 80%). I also do not allow a small percentage of my users to monopolize the radio time by letting everyone go unchecked. I have a limit but unlike other providers around me when the limit is reached I slow the connection to 1.5 megabits per second down and 128k up.

Suspending signup's can be very harmful to the cash flow but it is truly something I feel every isp should do when capacity becomes an issue.

If your passionate about rural broadband and really want to go out and give it your all. And you have a good grasp of networking at the very least. (at minimum know what the osi model is and properly understand it) I would say go for it mikrotik or ubiquiti is a good place to start for the wireless stuff, ligowave has some nice gear as well too canopy is another choice as well if speed is less important to you.

For networking gear hp has a wide selection of quality products as well as cisco.

I recommend you listen to my words and ensure that you do not end up going down the same path as my previous employer did. It will do nothing other then make you and your company look bad.

edit: If I were to start over again I would probably go mikrotik from the start the OmniTik U-5HnD would be a good place to start with 4 cpe's to go with it.

reply to Telecomnet
Your question is way too vague, bandwidth alone can vary as much as $900/mb within 100 miles where I live. Gone are the days where you could start with just a T1, Netflix and Youtube are the things people care about the most now. Anyone can tell you that you can setup a POP for as little as $350 in equipment, however, equipment will be the least of your problems. Acquiring reliable and reasonably priced bandwidth will be a big issue, even a dealbreaker. Then you have access(or lack of) to good sites, free bandwidth and free gear mean nothing if you don't have a decent spot for a POP. On the upside, equipment options and pricing have improved drastically since we started almost 10 years ago.

reply to Telecomnet
There's no cookie-cutter template for this.

Most of us in here started our WISPs because there was a need in the community with no one to fill it. So we started with what we had (5K in my case) and made up for what we lacked with hard work and no life.

I still work a fulltime job and only put about 5 hours a week into my WISP. I'm approaching 75 subs and could pay myself a decent salary for my time, but choose not to for the time being. All the $ goes right back into the business to grow it.

Before you even THINK about money you need information and a plan. What area(s) are you going to serve? How many houses will your prospective transmitter sites pass over? What speeds are you going to offer? Who is your competition?

How much to spend comes after you know the answers to those questions, and have used them to formulate a plan for getting from point A to boint B. It's like a trip. If I don't know what I'm driving or where I'm going, there's no way to know how much the gas is going to cost.

Go back to the drawing board.

reply to Telecomnet
Reality check here, »forum.ubnt.com/showthread.php?t=35378

reply to Chele

reply to Lightwave

reply to Telecomnet
Well after having built one or two for other people, I've decided to do one of my own. I'll start with a tilt over tower and $2,500.00. That will probably be enough for me to pick up 250 or so subs at about $20.00 per month. Overhead will be minimal and when I get to that point I will go for a faster connection or just let it run and stop adding subscribers. There are a lot of ways to make the business of reselling bandwidth work.
--
Once we IPv6 enable every device on the Internet we will have toasters, baby monitors, and security cameras joining the bot nets which today are populated only by idiots that can not refrain from clicking, "Yes I would like to see those titties..."

reply to Telecomnet
As you can read there are several "things" needed for success of building any WISP, including but not limited to: bandwidth, installers, network gear, and so on.

In most cases people start out with 5k-10 investments but have to find a niche market where there is no wifi or wireless. Then you have marketing and sales to think about.

I've build several hundred Wisp's (for others) over the decade, and seen demands flex in bandwidth due to VOIP and streaming video, so beware customers esp residential are extremely greedy and want to pay as little as possible.

Take time and actually do a cost cost analysis study on your WISP. If you don't have one, let me know (message me) and I will send you over a sheet we created to help start-ups. Then once you know your costs (hardware, towers, bandwidth, installers etc) then write a business plan....

Yeah things typically change for Wisp's pretty fast, but basic business rules do apply ( taxes, permits etc) and you need to also have "working" billing solution in place. Hope this helps....

GHz Wireless
"Nothing But Net - 2012"

reply to WHT