I would expect that many folks just dry lab’d the SAS info from Google Earth.
From: Ken Hohhof
Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2024 5:30 PM
To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group'
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
If you’re not currently using CBRS, note that someone on your staff will need
to get certified as a Certified Professional Installer (CPI). Not a huge
hurdle, and it’s a misnomer because they don’t necessarily install stuff. They
make sure the lat/lon, height, azimuth, frequency, etc. information given to
the SAS are correct. You COULD make all your installers CPIs, but more likely
one of your network engineers.
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Dev
Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2024 5:50 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
According to one data sheet for the 320s, they operate normally between 36140
and 36740 (if I’m reading that right), is there space to run 450M’s with any
speed outside of those frequencies with CBRS GA licenses anyway?
On Nov 30, 2024, at 2:10 PM, Ken Hohhof <khoh...@kwom.com> wrote:
> Asset sale indeed, very creative accounting I think has been going on,
don’t want that liability.
Reason why not to buy the company is in case they didn’t pay their tower rent
or taxes for years, or they have general liability claims against them, or
other things that could come out of the woodwork and become your nightmare.
One other thing to watch out for is prepays. If they got most of their
customers to prepay annually, then on average you will be providing 6 months of
service for no revenue. This is a bigger risk if you do a cash purchase rather
than X% of revenue for Y months.
> Is Tarana THAT much better than 450 AP’s in 3.6?
I have no personal knowledge. If you ask Tarana, it has almost magical
abilities. One of those seems to be convincing government agencies handing out
grants that you can deliver 100/20 service without fiber. I’m a skeptic ever
since I got burned on the WiMax hype (not PMP320 though). Maybe it is magic,
who knows, not me. Ask a Tigger, not an Eeyore.
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Dev
Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2024 2:59 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
PMP 320 with 10MHz channels, is that still even possibly legal? Don’t know
what throughput you can get from that. I also think that running these wherever
their 10MHz channel would have to cut into the channel widths they can get on
their 3.6 450 APs?
Asset sale indeed, very creative accounting I think has been going on, don’t
want that liability. How much are 450m subs in 3.6 these days?
We’ve already used most of the 5GHz, looking at 6. Is Tarana THAT much better
than 450 AP’s in 3.6? Also, I still might have a channel plan problem if the
old gear is still up.
On Nov 30, 2024, at 9:14 AM, Ken Hohhof <khoh...@kwom.com> wrote:
PMP320 was WiMax, right? How many years has that been EOL? I suspect the
performance isn’t that great either. Do those customers have no other choice
and that’s why they haven’t switched? Seems like with Starlink and 5G Home
Internet and other WISPs the customer base would be dwindling.
That sounds like the WISP equivalent of a Superfund site. The value of the
equipment is negative by however much it will cost to decommission and dispose
of the equipment. I would ask, if you do a buyout, what exactly are you
buying? Equipment? Customer list? Tower sites? Spectrum licenses? Fiber
feeding the towers? You might find that the value of the assets is zero or
negative, and you’d be doing the seller a favor by taking it off his hands for
$1.
Given there might be other shady things going on, don’t buy the business,
do an asset purchase. Which comes back to the question, are the assets worth
anything?
Could you overbuild him and then come to an agreement where he tells all
the customers the business is closing at X date and recommends they contact
this new WISP (you)? What he gets is a few more months revenue and doesn’t
have angry customers at his door with torches and pitchforks.
And is there a reason why it needs to be done in 3 GHz and not 5 or 6 GHz?
If there is a valid reason why only 3 GHz is suitable, I guess Cambium 450
maybe makes sense if you are looking to temporarily collocate sectors using 5
ms frame. But otherwise, you could also look at Tarana or LTE. Of course
those would be even more expensive.
Since they never switched to CBRS, I won’t ask if they bought any PALs.
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Jeff Broadwick - Lists
Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2024 9:08 AM
To: af@af.afmug.com
Cc: af@af.afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
Ugh is right.
Yes, they are not operating legally in CBRS.
Regards,
Jeff
Jeff Broadwick
CTIconnect
312-205-2519 Office
574-220-7826 Cell
jbroadw...@cticonnect.com
On Nov 29, 2024, at 9:46 PM, Dev <d...@logicalwebhost.com> wrote:
So they have around 100 old 3.6 subs sitting out there, even if you did
a swap to 450 subs in the 3.6 that’s still around $30K in swaps plus labor,
ugh, assuming you have enough 450 APs to handle all the subs.
Did someone say liability? Oh, also, if anyone complains they’d have to
come off the air right away, no?
On Nov 23, 2024, at 9:34 AM, <ch...@go-mtc.com> <ch...@go-mtc.com>
wrote:
Wow, access servers. Now that takes me back. Maybe 1991. I decided
to use a MC68360 mcu to receive a T1 and some kind of Rockwell DSP to receive
the data stream and be a modem. It would have been a 24 circuit dial up modem
fed with a T1, the 360 was the first MCI I knew of with a native hardware
ethernet port. I shelved it in favor of building some fax spy hardware (using
the same chips but converting to E1) for some French semi intelligence related
outfit to be used in Northern Africa and the middle ease. I loved the project.
But I should have finished the modem. Others eventually did the same thing
and were very successful.
From: Ken Hohhof
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2024 10:23 AM
To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group'
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
Regarding dialup, we had 3 or 4 Ascend MAX4000 servers in Chicago and
one in our WISP service area. We kept that one for awhile and gave free
accounts to WISP customers as a backup in case of an outage, but abandoned that
plan because nobody used it. 56 kbps was considered so slow as to be useless,
people would drive into town and use WiFi at a coffee shop rather than use
dialup.
It’s getting that way now if one of our licensed backhauls goes down or
has rain fade, it doesn’t make sense to fall back to a 5 GHz backup link with
less capacity. If people can’t stream, in their view they have no Internet.
Almost better not to use the backup link. Plus of course everybody starts
running speedtests and making things worse.
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of castarritt
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2024 9:32 AM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
Yeah, 50 subs on a 900 and 100+ on a 2.4 FSK was perfectly fine, then
Netflix decided to change their business model from mailing DVDs to streaming.
On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 8:02 PM Ken Hohhof <khoh...@kwom.com> wrote:
I hope they were doing wholesale dialup, not running their own access
servers. We dumped dialup in 2009. It was a race to the bottom, the going
price I think was $6.95/mo and if you were at $6.96 you got no customers. And
you had to spend half your revenue on Google ads to get the customers.
I think we still have 2 900 MHz customers on one Cambium AP. I can't
believe WISPs used to have like 50 subs per 900 MHz AP, at like $50/mo ARPU.
And those weren't even the 450i APs, they were FSK or Ubiquiti. Well,
smartgrid took care of that.
-----Original Message-----
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Dev
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2024 6:05 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
The good news is they recently retired the two last dial-up
customers! I didn’t know that still existed.
They finally migrated the last customer off their 900MHz, I think.
The rest of the diligence should be a fun-filled mystery I’m guessing.
> On Nov 22, 2024, at 3:59 PM, t...@3dsc.co wrote:
>
> Yeah almost all the 450 except some of the very first versions are
CBRs capable. If they still have pmp320s install there is a small chance that
it is running legaly, but not likely I had a customer that had an extended
grandfatherd license that was allowed to continue for a period of time while
they were transitioning. However its not likely.
>
> In this situation I would typicaly value these customers as
negative for asuming the liability or at least they would be removed from the
valuation I would recomend requireing them to be disabled before closing the
deal.
>
>
> On 11/22/24 5:48 PM, Mathew Howard <mhoward...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm fairly certain that all 450 hardware is CBRS capable, so
that's just going to be a matter of upgrading firmware and getting everything
properly configured and registered.
>> I don't think any wimax gear is CBRS capable.
>> At least some (probably most) LTE stuff can be upgraded to CBRS.
>> If it's a couple of old wimax APs with a small number of
customers, it's probably not that big of a deal, if it's hundreds of
customers... yikes.
>> On Fri, Nov 22, 2024, 3:57 PM Ken Hohhof
<mailto:khoh...@kwom.com%C2%A0%3cmailto:khoh...@kwom.com>> wrote:
>> If it is Cambium 450, we switched all of ours from Part 90 / NN
to
>> CBRS and I don't remember having to change any hardware. Other
3.65
>> equipment like a Purewave WIMAX system and some Ubiquiti stuff
and
>> another brand I don't recall, those were forklift upgrades.
>> That was like 5 years ago though. I know because my CPI cert is
>> about to expire.
>> ---- Original Message ----
>> From: "Dev" __
>> Sent: 11/22/2024 3:35:58 PM
>> To: "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" __
>> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Valuing obsolete equipment that still works
>> Also, we’d have to figure out how long it would take to swap
them,
>> trying to get a count of how much of a job this might be, i.e.
how
>> many subs.
>> > On Nov 22, 2024, at 1:31?PM, Jeff Broadwick - Lists
>> > <mailto:jeffl...@att.net%C2%A0%3cmailto:jeffl...@att.net>>
wrote:
>> >
>> > If it’s 3.65 that isn’t SAS capable, you are buying a large
legal
>> > liability.
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> >
>> > Jeff
>> >
>> > Jeff Broadwick
>> > CTIconnect
>> > 312-205-2519 Office
>> > 574-220-7826 Cell
>> > jbroadw...@cticonnect.com <mailto:jbroadw...@cticonnect.com>
>> >
>> >> On Nov 22, 2024, at 4:26?PM, Dev <d...@logicalwebhost.com
>> >> <mailto:d...@logicalwebhost.com>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> ?I think some may be in the old 3.6GHz, which is more of an
issue
>> >> because it gets in the way of the new 450 3.6GHz radio
channel
>> >> plan, so hoping not too many subs out there.
>> >>
>> >>> On Nov 22, 2024, at 12:11?PM, Steve Jones
>> >>>
<mailto:thatoneguyst...@gmail.com%C2%A0%3cmailto:thatoneguyst...@gmail.com>>
>> >>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> 0 value on equipment
>> >>> acquisition value on customer
>> >>> cost of doing business on swap
>> >>>
>> >>> On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 12:32?PM Dev
<d...@logicalwebhost.com
>> >>> <mailto:d...@logicalwebhost.com>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> Looking at purchasing a WISP that has old wireless
equipment
>> >>> that’s no longer supported but happy customers
connected to
>> >>> it. How do you set a value on a customer you know
you’re
>> >>> going to have to swap client radios on and point to a
>> >>> different AP, hopefully on the same tower?
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