How to start a WiMAX ISP?

Hi guys I'm looking for Wireless Guru's and Experts for this question such as yourselves =D

Let's start the question by giving you an idea of were I live.

I live in WV, in a county that is surrounded by mountains and by that I mean there is barely a road you can drive that is actually straight.

This county I live in has no cell service without the use of a booster and the ISP here is DSL that barely reaches to half the people in this area and they lose a lot of money because they can't reach folks that live in and around the mountains.

What I want to do is start a WiMAX ISP to give people a Internet Service and possibly Cell Service.

My questions are as the follow:

How well would WiMAX work in a rigged Mountain terrain, if at all?

and How much would it cost to start a WiMAX ISP?

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Comments

ehnde

I had a friend that lived in the middle of nowhere that had a deal with his local fire department about providing them free internet access in exchange for use of their tower. He had an 802.11b network going out in a 17 mile radius. I'm not sure if this is legal or what

This was in 2004.

JDMurray

WV is one of most dirt-poor states in the union. Will there be enough people who will subscribe to a WiMax service to make it viable? If there are, one wonders why it has been done already. That's worth looking into first. Maybe people are already getting Internet through their dish TV service?

Dustin.cisco

JDMurray wrote: »

WV is one of most dirt-poor states in the union. Will there be enough people who will subscribe to a WiMax service to make it viable? If there are, one wonders why it has been done already. That's worth looking into first. Maybe people are already getting Internet through their dish TV service?

I fix computers around here and people who can't get DSL have dial-up and they always ask me what could they do to get a faster internet service. So the need is there.

The people around here are facebook/social gossip addicts is primarily why.

ehnde

I think you could get started with a T1 and tower. 2 How to start Wireless ISP FAQ | DSLReports.com, ISP Information

Be really cool if you did this

JDMurray

Dustin.cisco wrote: »

I fix computers around here and people who can't get DSL have dial-up and they always ask me what could they do to get a faster internet service. So the need is there.

Not the need, but the customer's willingness to pay more than $4.95/mo for Internet service.

You need to check what the market will bear. It might be that wireless vendors have surveyed potential customers and determined that the majority of people interested in high-speed Internet access won't pay the minimum subscription necessary for the access company to make an acceptable level of revenue to stay in business.

In the research and feasibility stage of your new business, your problems are business- and financial-related first and technical second.

powerfool

Back in the hay day of dial up, you could get a dual link ISDN line (128k service) for your uplink, setup a proxy, a DNS server, and an email server, and offer dial up service for 8 users concurrently downloading, 64 currently connected, and 512 monthly subscribers (that is the math for overselling on dial up). It would require 3 T1 lines to support the dial up, but that is super cheap.

That is essentially what you are competing with... and since most folks will be using an existing webmail provider, they won't even likely have an email server.

Since they are used to dial up, you could probably offer them a super cheap plan with rather limited bandwidth. AT&T offers 756k down on a naked DSL for $14.95/month here. You could offer 256k down for $8/month if they are used to $5/month dial up. And if they have a second phone line, they would actually save money...