Re:Startups I Want to Fund
by icebraining on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @08:07AM
(#18129380)
Right, except if you spend $1200/household to connect those users (laying fiber is expensive[1]), you're looking at a decade before your profits actually start coming in. That means a massive initial investment, which needs a corresponding big reward to convince investors. And your non-dumb-pipe competitor will have a greater reward to give them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/434bwz/how_much...
Re:Startups I Want to Fund
by notyourday on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @08:42AM
(#18129594)
Do it in a boring way - via neighborhoods/groupings and not in a sexy way via point to point fiber everywhere. But even at $1200/household it is peanuts: birds being able to supply a large amount of bandwidth are expensive i.e. trench digging would be be far cheaper than launching and maintaining a pile of birds and earth stations to get even a fraction of that bandwidth magically beamed from above.
Edit: Been there - done that. Supplied IP over satellites. CapEx is a very solvable problem. OpEx would kill you.
I'm actually disappointed that it is "new kind of ISP" that made the list rather than just plain "ISP/NSP -- whatever way IP is delivered is fine". Making $10/mo profit in being a dumb pipe with 10 million subscribers in the US is a profit of $100 million in a month while being a a dumb pipe.