Are we talking about wireless? If I was starting fresh with wireless today, I’d target “up to” 50mbps and have a 100mbps plan for qualifying locations. I’d have an aggressive QoS plan to mitigate impact of heavy usage. I’d be a stickler about achieving and maintaining high MCS. To make that goal easier I’d say screw NLOS.
I’ve worked at 2 WISPs. The first built right on top of cable in a medium sized city. The second was almost entirely rural. The one building on top of cable never got more than 2% market share, but that wasn’t necessarily bad: * 2% of a good sized market can still make you plenty of money * The people who care about having the most Mbps just bought cable anyway, and we ended up with lighter and more casual users: I.e.: the cost efficient ones * The people who weren’t happy could just get cable and they wouldn’t be our problem anymore * Time Warner/Spectrum pisses someone off pretty much every day, so there was a steady stream of incoming customers greater than the number that would quit and get cable * There was more churn, but drive time to pick up or install an SM was rarely more than 15 minutes, so it wasn’t a big deal The one building mostly rural had a captive audience, but that wasn’t necessarily perfect: * People felt stuck with them, if they weren’t happy they would just keep complaining about the terrible injustice of the world * You have to try to serve both the light and heavy users. The heavy users would never be content. The light users may suffer from heavy users sucking airtime. In my mind, the goal is to have customers quietly enjoy their service, pay their bills, and not bother me. You’re a lot more labor efficient in that case, and it was way easier to get that if the unhappy ones could leave and the ones most concerned about $/mbit never signed up in the first place. There’s something like a 15% compound annual growth in data consumption per household in the USA and has been since Netflix streaming started taking off. Where that sucks for wireless is there’s no compound annual growth in available bandwidth. You have to plan around congestion and how you’ll deal with it, and you’ll have to plan your finances around a short upgrade cycle….like 5 years. I.E.: Plan not just how you’ll pay for today’s network, but how you’ll pay for the next network that you’ll need 5 years from now. I think that’s the piece that people are missing when they think they can still sell internet for $29/month. OR get into fiber. An XGSPON network has 10Gbps download capacity. Put 50 users on an XGSPON port and you won’t have to fret too much about that 15% compound growth for a good long while. You can sell the full speed of the ONT’s ethernet port to each customer if you want to (whether that’s 1Gb or 2.5Gb) and be confident that it’s truly achievable. I’m painfully aware of the capital required, and if you don’t have it you don’t have it. In that case rethink the whole wireless thing in light of how to cope with high demand and a short upgrade cycle. You won’t get away with selling 5Mb plans against cable. If I couldn’t see a path to victory I’d say exploit the tail while thinking about a different business to get into. There are definitely easier businesses to get into. :shrug: From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Jason McKemie Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2022 7:07 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <Af@af.afmug.com> Subject: [AFMUG] Competing with Mediacom / cableco I'm looking at moving into some areas that Mediacom has started serving in the past couple of years. For any of you that are already doing this, what kind of packages are you having luck with? What is your typical take rate? Thanks!
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