Briefly, I had to deploy what is now a pretty standard WISP setup but back then almost nobody was doing that so I had to learn everything from scratch. I'm an EE by birth so it wasn't that hard, and I've worked in the networking/network application development sphere most of my career so that part wasn't too hard either. Being your own ISP is basically just a problem solved only by the application of a subtle combination of time and money.

We exited the ISP market a couple of years ago though since it had turned into a deep money pit with the rise of Netflix. Today the network is still in place but only serves my home, fed by a traditional residential copper coax connection to our office building in town.