I have enjoyed reading this forum and have been reading alot!!. We are in the process of building the first phase of our network. We are a traditional network integrator and have been in business for 18 years. and, we have been selling and deploying pt-pt and pt-mpt wireless solutions for the last few years, and have been wating for the right opportunity to move into the “service provider” space vs selling the soltution only, this way we could start to build a reoccurring revenue stream. We are not an ISP (at least not yet) and our thoughts have been around offering a business class service to replace or compete with T1s and Frame Relay. My first question is this; Does anyone else offer these types of services via the Canopy product? We have been working on a business plan and are still fine tuning it and are still working out our model. If anyone would like to share with us how they built their’s that would be great, no since in recreating the wheel if we don’t have to.
Any insight would be helpfull and greatly appreciated
Graham
We are doing just that.
Feel free to call me at 925-300-6093
We have gone from where you are now all the way to the point now where we are in the process of upgrading our main backbone to 300Mbps so we can sell bandwidth to smaller ISP’s.
If you want my 2 cents. If you have the money to buy it all and the people with the knowledge to do it all I say go for it. If not I would suggest first deciding how many customers you want to provide service for initally and determin the bandwidth needs for them. Get a connection that will handle your needs. Being in the business for 18 years you probably know some of this already. I would let someone else handle your email, web hosting, DNS, that sort of thing in the beginning and concentrate on your backbone and infastructure first. Bring in a good customer base and then you can take over the Email and stuff when the money starts to come in. When buying equipment always have expansion in mind especially for the backbone like backhauls, routers, switches. Example: if you decide you will need 15Mbps to feed several sites the Canopy 20Mbps BH won’t do it. The 30Mbps will and is the same hardware as the 60Mbps so you can upgrade it later. The same with the 150 and 300. Keep in mind that if it is a 30Mbps BH you will never see a third of that so you have 20 to play with. This is true for all Canopy. They do say that the 150 and 300 are actual numbers. When we have them up i will post. Cisco 2600 wont cut it not mutch expansion. 3600 who knows? Personally i dont use Cisco’s cuz of the price. Our backbone has 3 internet connections. 1 OC3 capable only at 10Mbps for now, 1 DS3, and 1 with Fractional DS3. The routers at these locations are Linux based and handle routing, Firewall, and DHCP services. They are all 3 Supermicro Superservers P4 3GB dual core with 1GB DDR2 memory 6 ethernet ports all for under $1000.00 each. Managed switches so my probe can Sniff traffic accross the backbone. I could go on and on and on but i wont. Just remember the most important thing in order for you to compete with the telco’s and Cable co’s CUSTOMER SERVICE. Give Jerry Richardson a call he is doing exactly what you want to. He has good customer service plans and seems to understand Canopy well. You can also ask several others on this forum.
I really appreciate your time and effor to reply, and I Jerry thank you for your time yesterday. This is very exciting and I look forward to your contiued ideas and conversations