I’m looking at a place in Oklahoma that’s served by a local telco that offers 512K DSL for $50 per month. I called them a while back about a T1 and they didn’t know what it was. I’m sure someone there does. There is a larger city about five miles away that’s served by AT&T so I know a T1 is available there. I was thinking of backhauling it into this small town to offer real speeds. I just don’t know about competing with these small telcos. AT&T couldn’t touch this place for phone service.
Does anyone know if there is any legal reason why I couldn’t compete with this small telco by bringing in my own Internet?
Thanks,
Frank
I am kind of in the same situation. The answer I got from local telco is that there is not enough house holds here to justify a major telco upgrade. Thus, the local telco here gave me there blessing. As far as leagal rights , I do not see any myself as you are operating on an unlicense band so I assume. First come first serve basis on that I think…
as long as its unlicensed Freqs you can do whatever you want to offer service to whomever you want. we go head to head with Comcast,Verizon and Atlantic Broadband in some areas, and we offer VOIP also. And we have never had any legal issues just offering service.
I’d say do it. Blow them out of the water on pricing and customer service.
BOC’s and RBOC’s are not usually known for quality… There are exceptions however. 
Before you do, you might want to put together a little ROI analysis. This stuff ain’t cheap, it’s not easy, and you become beholden to your customers.
As far as being allowed, there are zero restrictions on purchasing, installing, operating wireless equipment, nor are there restrictions on selling service.
We started with a single T1. We put some Canopy AP’s on a tower and used an SM as the backhaul from the T1 to the tower. This got us to about 30 users.
Thanks for the info Jerry! That is encouraging for me as I am just now starting out as well. I have one T1 and 4 SM’s hooked up now. The good news is I still have a waiting list of about 17 people. I hope to have my Sector Antenna’s changed out soon enough. My new ones should be here this week. The problem is getting something tall enough to get to the top of the tower……But please keep up the encouragement……
Thanks for the replies. I currently run a WISP in Missouri. I just wasn’t sure about places with small telcos.
One of my best moves was to upgrade from an omin to sectors. It gave me some more punch on those long connections.
Jerry Richardson wrote:
We started with a single T1. We put some Canopy AP's on a tower and used an SM as the backhaul from the T1 to the tower. This got us to about 30 users.
we started out with a similar setup...
now we use a 75 GB back haul to a strand of Dark Fiber .... its amazing how things change lol
Hi guys, I’m just curious:
how fast did you grow up as a Wisp?
We started one year ago and now we have about 200 customers.
The company I work for moved into the rural high-speed internet business about 4 years ago. They started using a mix of Alvarion 802.11 equipment and D-link 802.11b equipment. Now we have 90% of our network running on Canopy equipment (We still have 1 tower running Alvarion equipment, and about half of our back hauls are Alvarion). We also do installs & service calls for Xplornet (Probably Canada’s largest WISP), who have just recently made the move to the licensed 3.5Ghz frequency in our province. In total we service nearly 1200 customers with plans starting at $34.99 a month, and ranging up to $450 a month for fully manged business accounts with 99.999% up-time guarantees.
Needless to say, we have come quite a long way. At the moment there are only 3 techs working in the WISP department of this company. 2 out in the field and one in the office doing tech support That should go to show how reliable Motorola equipment really is.
That’s pretty impressive. Good equipment can go a long way.
Smokeshow wrote: The company I work for moved into the rural high-speed internet business about 4 years ago. They started using a mix of Alvarion 802.11 equipment and D-link 802.11b equipment. Now we have 90% of our network running on Canopy equipment (We still have 1 tower running Alvarion equipment, and about half of our back hauls are Alvarion). We also do installs & service calls for Xplornet (Probably Canada’s largest WISP), who have just recently made the move to the licensed 3.5Ghz frequency in our province. In total we service nearly 1200 customers with plans starting at $34.99 a month, and ranging up to $450 a month for fully manged business accounts with 99.999% up-time guarantees.
Needless to say, we have come quite a long way. At the moment there are only 3 techs working in the WISP department of this company. 2 out in the field and one in the office doing tech support That should go to show how reliable Motorola equipment really is.