I started my first ISP in 1997 in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. It was a traditional dialup ISP, but we were able to deploy some DSL to businesses using “dry-pairs” – the bare copper lines running from the telephone company central office to each house and business. Under this model, DSL made sense. The cost to rent the loop from the phone company was $8 to $15/month, which left plenty of room for profit. In 1999, this model came crashing down as the loop costs were increased to the $30-$50/month range, burdensome paperwork and installation costs were imposed and the telco started offering their own DSL services at rates at or below the costs of a bare loop. This was a common story, played out all over the country as the independent ISPs began selling out, consolidating or going out of business. I sold my first ISP in November 2000, and considered myself lucky as the prices for ISPs dropped soon afterward.
I stayed on with the company after I was bought out, and focused on ways to generate revenue and deliver the higher speeds sought out by our customers. That is what lead me to look at wireless. ISP-Planet was a popular spinoff of the ISPCON show, and was one of the places where the independent ISPs would hang out. In 1999, I started following the ISP-Wireless list, which was a mailing list of operators who were using early unlicensed radios to deliver DSL speeds. After a couple of months watching the list, I decided to get some equipment and test it out. The results were mixed, but showed promise and I went ahead with wireless deployments in several towns where DSL was too expensive to deploy. In 2002, I attended the first WISPCON – a show dedicated to fixed outdoor wireless broadband with unlicensed equipment. This first WISPCON was a watershed event in the WISP industry.
After attending the show, I was able to find the solutions to many of the problems that I was facing with my wireless networks and connect with a few hundred other operators who were facing the same issues. It was also very clear that some of the new equipment exhibited at the show was going to transform the business model quickly. Most of the operators were using hacked up indoor access points with outdoor antennas on them, but low cost, outdoor-rated, higher quality equipment was now available and could replace the home-brew wireless gear that many of us had started with.
By 2003, my employer was reeling in the wake of the .com bubble bursting and I decided to get back into the ISP business again, but this time with a focus on wireless. I acquired partial ownership in a dialup/dsl ISP in Laramie, Wyoming and started to rebuild it with a focus on wireless. In May of 2004, my non-compete expired and I started a second WISP in Scottsbluff. It was extremely liberating to be free of the shackles of the phone companies as I built the two networks. The Laramie business suffered for a long time under the oppressive costs for backbone, dsl and phone lines, until we made the move to go with wireless and an outsourced dialup provider. By getting rid of the phone lines and dsl connection costs it become instantly profitable, even with a smaller customer base.
The Nebraska ISP, unburdened by any legacy dialup or dsl customers, was able to grow rapidly and by 2007 we merged the two operations into a single business, Vistabeam (www.vistabeam.com) that covered 35,000 square miles of very rural areas in Western Nebraska and Eastern Wyoming. WISPs have little regard for tariffs or rate centers. Like many WISPs, we would install equipment on one tower location, and look for the next place that had line of sight. Following this organic growth model, Vistabeam had over 1500 miles of microwave backhaul, 50+ access point locations and 2000 customers served by the end of 2009. For many of these customers, Vistabeam was the only choice for broadband.
The growth of Vistabeam mirrored the growth of other WISPs around the world, as operators finally had an economically feasible model to reach unserved and underserved areas with broadband. And that is how Medicine Bow finally got broadband.
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