I hope to read more of these posts, but I know Chris cannot afford to spend a lot of time writing them. Nevertheless I'm looking forward to reading part 3 when it is posted in 18 months.
PS slight grammar nitpick: overtime != over time
Edit: and "genre's"
As someone who built a bootstrapped company from $40k/y revenue through $3.5M/year over 14 years, before we were shot in the head by our bank, I was thrilled to hear that you were doing something like this, but concerned over the many potholes (pun, I guess, intended) you were going to encounter. One of the biggest ones that was an eye opener for me early in starting and running Scalable was the rent seeking behavior of your suppliers. You wrote this as "Everyone wants a piece of the cake."
Yeah. That. It doesn't get better.
My comments for now are
1) beware of banks and debt instruments. If you can avoid personal guarantees on loans, then sure. Chances are they will say "no guarantee, no money". That money is extremely expensive to you. Avoid it like the plague.
2) beware "partners" and people/companies that claim to want to help you. Do due diligence, deeply, on any organization, including lawyers, accountants, etc. you might consider using. Most will waste your time.
3) hiring ... is ... critical. This is hard as a small co, as you generally can't find great people unless you have a pile of cash. You can try to turn who you can get into great people. But this only works if they are willing and able to learn.
4) Venture capital. Don't get me started.
I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything.
Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale.
I had a number of folks offer to buy the company. I was too stupid to realize that one should hit a number of singles and doubles to be able to get enough of a base to hit homers and grand slams.
Best of luck, and I've subscribed to the site now.
>Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale.
I'm pulling for him too, but I have the awful feeling that I'm reading the story of a guy blowing his savings, ruining his credit, and maybe taking mom down with him.
Surely that must exist -- on the other hand, you mentioned the vendors do everything to lower the BOM, so perhaps they are lazy and this software is needed. Could be a good OSS project.
We definitely allow the B5 series to be more aggressive on auto-changes since it's dual-chain, and is in a noisy band, so moving 1 impacted chain while we keep the other up, if it means better throughput, is a nice option IF that's what you want.
To your comment Chris, we definitely will begin to open channel programming via software API for y'all, and more rich monitoring in the API/SNMP info relatively soon (hoping before year end).
When it comes to 5 GHz, I always suggest "exclude before you auto" - we were unique in offering single page spectrum setup and live spectrum analysis to make it easy for you to program where you want the radios to operate. So smarter exclusion based auto can be really nice if you know how to use it well. As you know, we built this all in the radio, but hadn't opened it up externally much other than the UI/browser.
We actually also built in some L2 and beacon discovery smarts to locally detect other radios on the same sync settings to make sure to coordinate so to speak. Frankly speaking, even if the radio wants to make a change, it has no way of knowing if it might impact something else, it just knows what's best for it's own operation without some higher level spectrum management coordination, so some coordination intelligence is a must if you have some spectrum that needs protecting when collocated.
Really the need for auto behaviors is relatively limited to backhaul and unlicensed - most don't want their sector/APs to move unless it's a major event given all the clients connected. On new products like the B24, we really just analyze narrowing channels if things get bad enough, but there's really no other channels to move to, and on licensed products, you have to stick to your licensed channel of course.
On multipoint, for example, the APs collect and analyze spectrum masks from each client, and the primary thing they'll do is allow an individual client to narrow (e.g. from the 80 MHz channel to 20 MHz) in case they see more noise in a part of the channel, poor mans OFDMA, but that functionality becomes very advanced in the 11ax based chip for us in the future.
Lots of new stuff announcing and shipping this week and in Vegas next month, so stay tuned.
And FWIW I've never had auto anything actually work and pick the right channel. If you're trying to GPS sync, forget auto. But you know that already.
We already have 60% of the street we just cut up signed up for service.
It would be faster for me to crawl on the ground to the nearest PoP and plugin to a GPON port then it would be for me to wait for them.
I certainly wish you good luck but I suspect that you are missing something if you think you're going to compete with national providers who have access to billions in capex and infinite marketing budget, selling a product where almost no customer understands the fine details of QoS and customer service (which are the only ways in which you can differentiate your offering).
fwiw we have dedicated fiber loop (not ftth) providers here (middle of nowhere, USA) who will deliver service for $600/mo with low or zero install charge so I question your $3k/mo figure.
The organisers also run BornFiber who are connecting the entire island with optical broadband.
BornFiber is a good example of how anyone with the right skill can start a fiber provider here in the nordics.
I'm glad to see this philosophy being adopted by the US.
However. Once they have fiber they still need some ISP and that's where the national ISPs come in. Thankfully we have plenty of options here but I hear things aren't as good in the US.
Just get some neighbors together and go for it.
Having lived in Northeastern PA at various points in my life, I can attest that Internet speeds there have always kind of lagged behind. I knew people in more rural parts of the area who had basically zero wired internet options at all. It kind of just becomes something you learn to deal with.
Are there VCs who invest in this sort of enterprise? The odds of getting a positive return seem favorable compared to many of the currently trendy software-only startups out there.
Also, I like Chris' tagline:
Create value, not excuses.A software startup can exit at 10x, an infrastructure investment won't.
but I really came here to comment on what I think is a financial error: rent vs buy cost. yeah, it seems more expensive to rent if you consider long term ownership of equipment, but this is very misguided. maintaining, repairing, insuring and just storing heavy equipment that you use rarely is just not the way to go. it's cheaper to rent.
> nothing to show for the nearly $10,000 in rental fees
you have no long term expenses to show for it. that's a wonderful tradeoff.
That's not... the Scranton, PA is it?
Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...
- Vastly superior customer service
- Simpler contracts; straight fee-for-service without any bullshit
- Likely better price overall
For the most part, he isn’t competing with DSL. He is competing with cable. It looks like Comcast does service the area.
Another thing that stands out was that the article mentioned he was paying $1000 for a “< 1Gpbs” Fiber line.
From the link on what’s available in Scranton, it looks like Comcast also offers 1Gbps downloads.
He also said that he has 200 customers - mostly business.
I don’t see how this makes sense from an investment standpoint to offer service in an area that doesn’t appear to be underserved.
I’m definitely no fan of Comcast, but their business internet service is straightforward. If I’m running a business, the cost difference between Comcast and Loop is neglible.
Personally, I’m glad to have the much better, cheaper, gigabit service from AT&T, but I would grin and bare Comcast again if I had too.
But I have no idea why they stopped.
Latency, or just bandwidth?
People are jumping every day from cable to them for both speed and reliability.
Most WISPs are started by the local computer repair shop by someone who things that configuring a Linksys router is network engineering. They are plagued with reliability issues mostly of their own creation. I'm not knocking the people, they are filling a need and doing it 'good enough'.
If you build it right, they will come.
Keep them coming Chris, if you can :)