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Hey guys I am planning to start a small reselling wifi service in my town so people can stay conn...


G+_Vincent Panico
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Hey guys I am planning to start a small reselling wifi service in my town so people can stay connected all the time and not lose signal. say I wanted 100 people to get on. would 800gb of bandwidth be good or would I need more? and what type up setup would I need? any info would be great

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So, you're starting up a WISP?

Will you have customers who use your service as their primary connection, or is this more or less wifidog/hotspot access in the shopping district? 800GB sounds like a lot at first, but if you have customers who exclusively use your service, far less than a hundred could burn through far more than that in a month.

 

Even wifi use from 100 handhelds could crush 800GB faster than you might expect. At home, I burn through data because I essentially have no cap. I get letters from my ISP, but they never threaten to cut me off. It's always a sales pitch for a faster plan. But when I'm mobile, I curb my usage severely, and even then I've bumped 2GB in a month with just 1 phone and zero video viewing.

 

Given 50 users who just don't care and are watching youtube/netflix all day long, that 800GB wouldn't last long.

 

So then you have to figure out exactly what you'll provide in speed, and game it out as each customer maxing out his/her speed for what, 8 hours a day, every day, and see where that gets you. At that point I think it becomes a hard sell if you're asking $20 a month for a guaranteed 1Mbs connection just to make sure your revenue is equal to or greater than  your costs. Your take, and the thoughts of your potential customer base, could be vastly different from mine.

 

Perhaps Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ can ping one of the WISP operators he knows and get them to share some insight.

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Starting an ISP sounds like a fun challenge and thanks to Title 2 it should be a piece of cake, right?

 

Most likely to I'll have to find someone in the area to buy bandwidth from. This will be a large ISP with fiber in the ground - maybe AT&T, Century Link, Time Warner, Comcast, etc... Typically they have it in the TOS that you can't just resell access to the cable Internet you'd buy for your house.

After that you'd need a way to get that access to everyone who needs service. Wireless might be the easiest and setup a tower to connect all the houses. Otherwise you'd probably have to bury cable or lease someone else's.

 

Speaking of leasing, don't some DSL providers let you resell their service? If you're going for an open to everyone option, you'd also need to provide modems and routers to all your customers. The router would need to be configured for a open guest network and a secure private network for the homeowner. I think I remember hearing about Comcast doing something like that, but they had the second guest network completely segregated from the private network with its own public IP and everything.

 

Those are just the thoughts that come to my mind with a project like this. I personally like the wireless idea, but that could require the most maintenance too.

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I guess it's a tough call since I don't know anything about your neighborhood or what ISPs you have in the area. Are you wanting to put up multiple access points in the neighborhood or just one? Do you want to restrict access or leave it open?

 

If you're selling access to the Internet, your an ISP - regardless of how that connection is made. Wifi is just the connection.

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Gotcha. Looks like pretty traditional neighbourhoods with houses spaced 10-15ft apart... Just gonna say, it will be difficult to hit 100 houses with 2 APs. Not saying it can't be done, just difficult. When you figure there's already 1 wireless router per house and most on 2.4GHz, every channel is already jammed multiple times over. You could probably get by with outdoor antennas everywhere and use 5Ghz pretty reliability, but still not ideal.

 

If you're servicing that many houses, you'll probably want fiber, but cable Internet could certainly handle the bandwidth if your ISP could supply it.

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