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A comment on Lessons from the failure of General Magic. Parent comment

Re:Lessons from the failure of General Magic by walrus01 on Thursday July 26, 2018 @03:05PM (#17620022)
Start-up ISPs doing high speed last mile and middle mile access with self-built infrastructure. It's not sexy cloud based SaaS bullshit. You can't do it all sitting at a desk in a shared office in a WeWork studio. It requires physically going places and doing things at OSI layer 1.

But there are still a number of places in the world (and indeed within the US and Canada) that lack real broadband Internet. Or have truly terrible shitty noncompetitive options. It's capital intensive and requires a team encompassing the "full stack" of network engineering skill sets. If you're unhappy with Comcast type huge shitty unethical ISPs, build your own. Make a principled commitment to not "selling out", network neutrality, and high quality attentive customer service and no-nonsense billing.

There are plenty of challenges out there if you seek them out.

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Re:Lessons from the failure of General Magic by icedchai on Thursday July 26, 2018 @09:19PM (#17622755)
sounds like less money than SaaS BS. Most SaaS BS doesn't make any, either, but at least investors like it...
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Re:Lessons from the failure of General Magic by walrus01 on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:35PM (#17623056)
It very much depends, fiber construction can have a very long ROI and be very costly depending on how much of it has to be underground, right-of-way issues, etc.
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Re:Lessons from the failure of General Magic by icedchai on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:01AM (#17626442)
How about fixed wireless? I have ISP experience and a decent amount of startup capital. It just seems like potential for a real money pit and massive losses with cable and fios both in the area...
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Re:Lessons from the failure of General Magic by walrus01 on Friday July 27, 2018 @03:29PM (#17628572)
Fixed wireless should definitely a part of any small/start-up ISP plan. If you're in an area that's solidly served by GPON and ADSL2+/VDSL2 by the ILEC phone company (FIOS), and they're really built the fiber network out a lot, that's hard to compete with. And hard to compete with a solid DOCSIS3 network that reaches everyone. You'd have to find an area on the far outlying reaches of your metro area that is much worse off, where a market need exists.
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