I'm not sure if this qualifies as an "online business", but I started an ISP in November '15. It's also not entirely "one-person". I am the sole founder, but I do hire part-time help on occasion if I'm swamped. It started off as a WISP and has finally grown to the point where we are beginning to deploy fiber.
I still work full-time as a systems engineer, but the business started bringing in more money than my job does around 3 months ago. I'm only still at my job so that I can expand more rapidly; running fiber isn't cheap.
Hey! I run a new ISP in Montana. We're actually about to head to China to source more affordable fiber and OSP materials. If you want to chat we have a slack channel called #ispschool that has a bunch of ISP owners in it. http://slack.tsi.io
I never would've imagined an ISP being run almost entirely by one person. This is super dope - best of luck in the continual expansion of your business! :)
I am currently starting a small ISP to bring internet to our lake community. Fiber from Level3 and Ubiquiti wireless gear (and other hardware, routing, packet shaping, firewalling, AV, e-mail, voucher system, etc). About 110 houses around the lake spanning about 1.5 miles long and .40 miles wide.
It depends on your country I guess, it's very common here where most ISPs by capacity on other networks. But also in the rural / wireless broadband space where you actually have to manage infrastructure there are a few examples.
I'm curious about what your network connects to in order to access the broader internet.
Do you call up an existing ISP, like Verizon and say you want to set up a peering arrangement, or do you have to purchase a business account with an existing provider and increase the bandwidth you pay for as your own network expands?
i hear this question a lot. "how do you compete with xyz megacorp?"
delivering a better/faster product for less money, is the easy part. nearly everything is overpriced from megacorps. believe me, it's easy. even the accounting is harder.
the hard part is selling it. people will complain all day about megacorp sucking, but when it comes right down to it, they won't go with the little guy 99% of the time even when the benefits are staring them right in the face.
unless of course, you happen to offer a service in an area the big guys simply don't exist in, which is awesome and good for OP for spotting the opportunity.
This is true outside of tech as well. Work at a midcorp with about 50-100 offices worldwide, we have 21 year old juniors who don't know shit (like me) follow templates and flowcharts to do bulk legal or accounting work, slightly more complex than data-entry, we charge clients $250 an hour. Most of the kids do have plenty of critical thinking competencies, but knowledge wise it's a few days of on the job training, it virtually doesn't matter if you majored in erotic dance or tax law, pretty much anyone can do the work... each of these kids generates close to half a million in revenue per year. And the costs are essentially salaries (averaging $25 including benefits and all) and an office (a fraction of that), profit margins are about 75%.
Those rates are utterly ridiculous because the work can be done from any location, a lot of these companies are in 2nd tier cities where the cost of living is very reasonable.
I won't even go into the opportunities of automating this stuff, but it's ridiculous...
But the hard part is selling it. I could easily run a team of 10 of these juniors who produce the same work (volume and quality) that generates $5m in revenue a year at the bigcorp, on a budget of 0.5m. Business wise it's almost free money, but without the big corp brand name, it's really hard to sell, even prices were cut by 50% or more and you put sales agents are ridiculous commissions. It's just crazy how important it is to clients to interface with a big brand name corp, despite the fact the actual people doing much of the work are on the level of interns. This is true for lots of finance/legal/consulting companies I find.
The reason is "exposure". Big companies want someone whom they believe has experience, and whom they can hold liable if there are problems. It's not the company spending the money - it is a collection of corporate people spending a budget allotted to them, who want a promotion.
I'm working on a deal with a local private school and that was the first question I got. "How can you offer faster speeds and better pricing than Frontier, Verizon, etc?".
They were previously paying $2,000/m for 100 Mbps. It's not that hard to compete with that. haha
the difficult part is getting someone to understand that they have been vastly overpaying -- that means they must call into question their own (past) judgment, which for some people is easy, but for most people, is extremely hard (mild cognitive dissonance).
i find it especially interesting that the question is coming from a small private school, who's business model is basically the same thing. i.e. offering a superior alternative to larger, better funded incumbent institutions.
Well, considering that the biggest period of growth private schools experienced was during desegregation, I would wager that most private schools exist as an escape hatch for parents who find their school district undesirable for one reason or another. Also, most private school students in the US go to a religiously-affiliated institution so there is a strong element of religious indoctrination there.
Stereotypically, charter schools are the ones that are supposed to be better than public schools at a cheaper cost to the government (charter schools can be private or quasi-public).
> Stereotypically, charter schools are the ones that are supposed to be better than public schools at a cheaper cost to the government (charter schools can be private or quasi-public).
I'd also question the extent to which reality bears this one out, but yes, that is the view.
But that person on the phone is almost certainly reading from a scripted prompter and could care less about your issue. It would probably take 2-3 days to get someone on-site if there was a physical issue with your connection. I've gotten calls before at 2am and was on-premise by 2:30am, does ATT do that?
it's easier to get the small provider on the phone.
but i mean, this is simply what you believe to be true. in reality, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, because you believe it. that's what small companies fight against every day of their life.
you don't actually understand what it takes to run a small technology business, because you're a guy who just has a normal job. you don't make a lot of money because there aren't a lot of expectations and obligations in your line of work.
1. yup. he doesn't take vacations.
2. if he's sleeping, he gets woken up, or he loses the business.
when you run a business there's nobody to pass the buck to. it's your problem, end of story. you're a big boy now, pull up those pants.
ask a line cook or sous chef how many vacations and how much sleep they get.
there are people who get blown up by bombs in the middle east, today. right now. those are real people. do you think not taking a vacation is some kind of huge sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're trying to make a large amount of money?
these are the hard facts that people don't write fun blog posts about and that normal people with jobs find impossible to believe because they are not business owners and never will be.
> there are people who get blown up by bombs in the middle east, today. right now. those are real people. do you think not taking a vacation is some kind of huge sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're trying to make a large amount of money?
Give me a break; what the hell does that have to do with the discussion?
Forget about the vacation then. Suppose he gets hit by a car.
let's suppose he does. let's also suppose a probate lawyer will notify you that the principal of the firm you are working with has been killed, the company will go into receivership and run by an organization that specializes in that sort of thing until all the customers have been notified of the need to switch providers. then the assets will be liquidated, either by the estate or the government in lieu of an estate if there is no next of kin or trust / family / whatever.
suppose your large provider goes bankrupt and is bought out, and accidentally shuts off your fiber as part of the takeover process? what then? do you think anyone gives a shit about you then?
this has happened to me, personally. i have 3 internet connections at home for this reason (2 LTE lines and a cable line). in addition, i know _ALL_ the spots around my house where i can get a wifi signal. this is because i take my business seriously, like most people do. i don't expect some magic person to drop out of the sky during an emergency and fix everything for me.
my primary cable ISP is one of the largest in the nation, i'm not going to be fooled into thinking they're somehow reliable. they're never on time, and their service sucks. yet my plumbing company, owned/run by a single guy, always shows up on time and fixes my problem (i live in an old building with plumbing problems).
you live in a world of constant "what if" fear because you lack the experience to know how to handle bad business situations. a small business has more to fear from their customers simply not paying than from inability to deliver good service.
Do you think starting an ISP is still a possible venture? I've been looking into it for the last few months but everyone around me tells me it isn't possible/worth while. How much capital did you have up front?
It's going to be extremely location-dependent. Your best bet is to fill a niche that nobody else has gone after because it doesn't fit their national standards.
Remote location, or otherwise protected against a national moving in?
No current competitors, or only low-quality competition?
But with enough latent demand?
If all three of those are yes, you might be able to make it work.
You'll need to think about fiber or wireless, and if you're doing wireless, how to get fiber to your distribution points. Licenses: right-of-way for fiber, radio operation for wireless.
IPv4 space? Good luck.
IPv6 space? Much easier, but people still won't find it compelling all by itself. (On the other hand, starting an ISP today means you can probably do all your internal work on IPv6. Do so!
Can you get two independent high-bandwidth connections? If not, can your customers stand the inevitable downtime?
What level of reliability are you aiming for, anyway?
What services are you going to provide besides bandwidth, IP addressing, routing, NTP and DNS?
Are you prepared for customer service? Business or residential? Either way, you will eventually have to listen to someone on the phone telling you that they deleted the internet.
I have a friend that runs as a WISP on the side in Michigan as there are no other options. He only has a /26 given to him by a single provider, so the 5-10 customers he has are behind a NAT.
> Do you use the line of other providers? And how profitable is?
Yes, we're peering with Zayo and will also have Level 3 (waiting on build) in April.
Don't really want to toss out numbers but the bandwidth itself is extremely profitable. The equipment and fiber needed to connect to end-users are 95% of the costs.
Have you considered getting into colo or other services that might reduce the capital expenses per dollar of revenue? Seems like there may be an opportunity there. I once had a 2U FreeBSD box at a local dial-up ISP, and it was basically found money for them.
Oh man. I hope this works out and it expands. My old company (now defunct) tried to do FTTX back in the early 2000s transitioning from dial-up. Got 15M from investors to run fiber in Hazelton, then Service Electric sued and funding dried out and everything when to crap.
I started with around $15k, but that's nothing compared to what I've dumped into the business since then. If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started this.
> If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started this.
You said you are making more money from this than from your full-time job. So I'm assuming the business is profitable and has a ton of potential. Are you saying that it requires too much work, and that it wasn't worth it?
Everything is all swell now, but there have been days, weeks, months, where everything was one payment, one customer, one ..., from imploding. I got lucky.
Don't give up. It sounds like you've passed some important milestones and are in a good place business wise. (unsure about mental stress level/burn-out wise tho ;>)
Hey Chris,
Hello Neighbor! Thought about this idea in the Lewisburg (Central Susquehanna Valley) region and was wondering how the pole access stuff works? Also, what kind of densities do you need to get the WISP profitable to be able to make a move to fiber? Would love to email with you - its in my bio.
That's fantastic! I'm not too far from you (Lake Wallenpaupack region) and I've always wanted to start a WISP, but the lack of housing density out here makes it less than economical =(
The site is https://nepafiber.com
I still work full-time as a systems engineer, but the business started bringing in more money than my job does around 3 months ago. I'm only still at my job so that I can expand more rapidly; running fiber isn't cheap.