Building a Wireless ISP Network... The Opportunity

In the US, most of the people have one or more broadband access services to choose from - variations of DSL from multiple vendors and cable. That is if you're in a metropolitan area. For more rural locations your choices are limited.....if you have any at all. Therein lies an opportunity for those willing to pursue it.

In the rural areas of the country, the selection is limited. Satellite is available to anyone (at high cost), but between dial up and T1 there are no options for many residents. Satellite suffers from latency, making it unsuitable for VoIP and some other real time Internet services. Some applications that should not be sensitive to latency (email, Web forms) will perform poorly or fail due to the increased packet time.

The traditional carriers (RBOC) and resellers face a cost issue in bringing broadband service to outlying areas. Without a concentration of users the per user cost at published rates causes either a poor or negative margin. The way cost accounting is done in larger corporations makes the business case worse for a large carrier. Cost allocations between departments for such things as floor space, personnel, and backend support end up as added costs rather than leverage opportunities. Traditional wired service will not reach outlying residents unless mandated by law, and the trend is against this happening in the near future.

So the opportunity is open for a business offering Internet broadband access service to outlying residents.

Therein lies a tremendous opportunity.

Now....just how do you go about taking advantage of this opportunity, filling a need, and building a wireless ISP network?

To assist you with working through the planning and execution of this effort here are some insights and resources you should consider:

* Business Continuity Planning - This isn't the technical side of the business, the backup systems, redundant pathing, fail-over and restore, or alternate location stuff. Here you're looking at subjects such as Legal Structure, Personnel Insurance, Asset Insurance, and Process and Procedure.

* Revenue and Profit - Covers where and how to create your income including installation, basic monthly service, custom access service, volume or corporate pricing, other services, business partnerships, usage based service, civic service, and tower leasing (or you could build and provide your own).

* Security Issues - There's much to consider in this arena. Don't overlook it.

* Bandwidth issues - The access line to your tower(s) is likely the critical factor to success. Whether it's a T1 or a DS3 line. First off, it probably represents your single largest operational cost. Next, it determines the maximum quality of service you can provide.

Quotes you receive for bandwidth will probably be very different in terms of cost and performance guarantees, and should cover Performance Standards, Service Availability, Mean Time to Respond, Mean Time to Repair, Latency, Packet Loss, and Jitter. To help you search for the best match provider for your bandwidth requirements....I recommend utilizing the services of an unbiased independent broker by submitting a RFQ request to DS3-Bandwidth.com.

Here are some additional resources that may be of benefit to those developing a WISP....or thinking of it.

StartAWisp.com

WISP Centric

There's also an excellent forum for discussion of ideas and issues between WISP owners and potential developers at DSLReports.com.

Final advice.....think strategically taking care to consider the business areas hilighted above. Do make use of an independent unbiased broker for the bandwidth decsion. Also, apply the resources shared here as well as any others discovered from your own research.

Michael is the owner of FreedomFire Communications....including Business-VoIP-Solution.com. Michael also authors Broadband Nation where you're always welcome to drop in and catch up on the latest BroadBand news, tips, insights, and ramblings for the masses.

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Business Prospects Of Wimax -- An ISP point of View

The prospects for WiMAX technology as a viable business opportunity are often the subject of debate amidst numerous actual or perceived challenges. Applying these innovative insights can make these arguments and challenges disappear.

Unlike most people's expectation of rural deployments, you might consider targeting SME's in urban areas. There are several reasons for this:

?There is a growing demand in business for bandwidth capable of carrying symmetrical traffic, for voice, applications and uploading of larger files.

?There is a small but growing need for separated last mile services. Currently, however many wired service providers you have, they all use the incumbents' last mile infrastructure based on its nearest telephone exchange location unless you have paid for an expensive dig from the next nearest exchange. This leads to single points of failure and the potential for business communications to be down for days, as can happen say with a cable duct fire somewhere in the spoke.

Your worst case environment would be a very high-density urban area with lots of interfering buildings, has multiple fibre networks, ADSL and SDSL in every exchange, hundreds of competing suppliers, a restrictive property planning regime with many 'listed' buildings, and no spare spectrum for FWA except the public 5.8GHz band.

To do this, because of the scale of competition from other service providers, your model needs to be disruptive. It has to offer things that businesses need (like QoS, toll-quality VoIP, high-quality video, symmetric bandwidth, higher capacities and network separation etc) at a lower cost.

This means stripping all unnecessary cost out of the model. You'll benefit from a quality RF planning tool that gives you a major advantage over other operators - mapping exactly where you can provide service, how to set up the customer antenna, what bandwidth can be achieved etc, based on your base-stations. You need to know exactly how to tune base-stations to avoid blackspots - without needing an RF team.

Although Wi-Fi and WiMAX often get confused, they are very different from an operators perspective. Wi-Fi is plug and play with no control over the wireless interface. WiMAX is not, it behaves more like a carrier ATM network. Wi-Fi is built into laptops and handsets, whereas FWA WiMAX requires larger standalone receivers (yours should mount on customer rooftops for optimum utilty).

The benefit is that WiMAX is very spectrally efficient, at least 50% more so than 3G networks, so it has much higher data-carrying capabilities in limited spectrum. All Wi-Fi shares the same public spectrum - WiMAX can work across a wide range. Wi-Fi provides service over a range of 100m, your WiMAX needs to provide 10Mbps over a range of 1.3km from a base-station non-line-of sight.

WiMAX can create carrier-class networks, Wi-Fi cannot ?not even with mesh networks. However, Wi-Fi with WiMAX backhaul gets some of the benefits of WiMAX as the backhaul such as VPNs. A lot of WiMAX customer equipment will come with Wi-Fi built in.

Dont wait for mobile (802.16e) WiMAX ?your experience with vendors may be that they're around fourteen months to two years behind on their promised delivery dates, and further delays could occur to key requirements. Dont expect good enough 802.16e equipment to build a network with until late 2007 at the earliest, and no usable CPE until 2008 ?as its mobile battery life is crucial and that will take time to get right.

There are big enough markets for FWA now. The most important thing is to grab the scarce resources first ?spectrum etc ?and make them yours. Except in those undeveloped countries without a mobile operator, mobile WiMAX will be very difficult to establish against incumbent operators with large installed bases because the areas covered are important to customers ?which is not a consideration for FWA.

Michael is the owner of FreedomFire Communications....including DS3-Bandwidth.com and Business-VoIP-Solution.com. Michael also authors Broadband Nation where you're always welcome to drop in and catch up on the latest BroadBand news, tips, insights, and ramblings for the masses.

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