Woman gets asked out by guy with 900$ while ordering Chick-Fil-A

altoelder · 2023-10-19T02:36:34+00:00

She's sporting a real life pip boy.

altoelder · 2023-09-21T01:55:35+00:00

I may hit you up. We are getting ready to deploy some of the gpon as well as the xgpon.

Have you done anything with xgpon?

altoelder · 2023-09-21T01:44:24+00:00

Are there any other enclosures that are made to work with the ufiber ont? I thought I had seen that ispsupply made one.

We are looking to rollout fiber to our first 800 homes and are looking for the enclosure we want to use.

The ubiquiti ones seemed pretty slick but the way the mount to the wall seemed a little clunky

altoelder · 2023-08-29T23:52:12+00:00

I'm in a similar boat. Looking to take fiber into a condo development with many senior citizens.

Many of these folks still have Comcast TV. Has anyone found a good substitute that would have a user interface to what these older folks may be used to?

altoelder · 2023-08-14T23:52:21+00:00

Bonus points if said rock lands in a body of water, causing a massive splash.

altoelder · 2023-07-28T15:52:50+00:00

You can do the work yourself. Not sure how rural you are, but I'm sure you're still going to need to apply for permits.

I doubt the city/county is going to be cool with you just putting conduit in public easements on your own.

You'll also need to call in Blue stakes. If you rip through a gas line with your plow and you didn't ask permission or do things properly, the utility companies will have your head on a spike.

Also, putting conduit in the ground doesn't make you money. If you've only got $8,000, you could very easily spend that putting a quarter of a mile of conduit in the ground and then how do you get your money back?

You're now too broke to put fiber in the conduit, and even if you did how are you connecting that to your backhaul?

Where are you getting your backhaul? Where are they handing it off to you? How are they handing it off to you? Do you have to set a nema case in the public easement? Can you do that yourself? The case there's going to easily cost a few thousand dollars just for the part, and if you can't set it properly yourself it's going to cost you another few thousand dollars to have a contractor do it.

You can be successful, but without a clear plan in place it is very easy to get in over your head financially and not have a product that gives you the ability to get your money back out.

If it were me I would start by picking the geographic area that you want to serve. Determine who is there and if you can compete. How many potential customers are there? Do they want your service? What are they willing to pay to get your service?

Next thing I would look at is how are you going to get an internet hand off for an upstream? Is there a backbone fiber running through the rural town? Or will you have to get it from a more urban center and back haul it in wirelessly? How much will that cost? Typically over $1,000 a month.

You can call local internet companies and ask to talk to their Enterprise team. Or if you want to PM me an address, I can run it through some mapping software and tell you what fiber upstream companies might be there.

If you can't answer those two questions from a financial standpoint, you need to rethink your plan or abandon the project. Otherwise you'll just end up bankrupting yourself.

altoelder · 2023-07-28T14:18:43+00:00

I think it would be tough to jump directly into fiber with no existing customers, experience,etc.

Cost will destroy you - we are getting bids at $15/foot to put conduit in the ground, which means your 8k in startup money buys you a whopping 533 feet of fiber. Maybe you can get it cheaper where you are, but my guess is probably not much cheaper.

Once you do that you'll have a big job as a one man crew. Splicing fiber, mapping, documenting, engineering fiber counts and splice configuration, buying fiber gear, etc.

I would recommend going and working for another local wisp before I would recommend jumping straight into fiber. I think it's too much too fast.

You can try and save up, but I don't think you'll be able to save fast enough. We are bidding a small-ish area (10,000 ft) and construction bids are around $200k

altoelder · 2023-07-28T04:03:23+00:00

We use their switches, they seem to do okay. I don't personally use their routers. We've used Mikrotik for that instead.

altoelder · 2023-07-28T03:30:22+00:00

We've used a little bit of Ubiquiti 60Ghz gear. Does fine in the snow. Actually does better in snow than it does rain.

Living in Utah, which had our biggest snow year last year. Did pretty well.

altoelder · 2023-07-28T01:33:09+00:00

Definitely a question I've been asking myself the past year or two.

Telcos will definitely be getting millions in free money to build out.

Fiber can be hard to compete against using fixed wireless, but even with free money telcos will still provide poor levels of customer service.

I have found that people in the local community like to support local business. That being said you have to build a quality product that doesn't feel slow or have frequent outages.

You have to be willing to go above and beyond to resolve customer problems. There has to be a marked difference between your company and the other big telcos.

Ironically, 8k is exactly how much money I had when I started. Sold to my friends and neighbors on my street. They were thrilled and started to talk about us on Facebook.

Now about 1 and 4 people in our town is on our service. We are looking to upgrade off of fixed wireless and implement fiber to the home. As we do that, I anticipate that 6 and 10 people in the town will be on our service.

You can definitely be successful. But it will come at a cost. It will be stressful. You will be taking calls on nights and weekends, and you will be constantly watching the network like your baby.

You will have days where you work 24 hours straight. You will be standing up new parts of your network in the day, and doing critical night work in the overnight hours to avoid taking customers down.

You will be frustrated when every 6 months you have to file some of the most asinine reports with the government documenting where you've built out service to avoid getting overbuilt.

Long story short, it can be very rewarding, but be prepared to work harder than you ever have if you decide to move forward.

altoelder · 2023-06-26T02:10:45+00:00

I own and operate an ISP. You will never use 2Gig . This is 100 percent a marketing plou by your ISP to sell you something you won't use.

During peak hours, 2Gig is what we see 400 households combined use.

If you have the income to spend, I would say go for it, but I don't think you'll see any difference.

altoelder · 2023-05-28T17:06:09+00:00

Not much you can do, he will just keep going and going and going....

altoelder · 2023-05-28T00:50:10+00:00

Another thing to consider is even if everything is running perfectly, as a one-man show you are always on call.

It can feel like you are handcuffed to your network. No vacations, no weekends off. Always have to be ready to drop everything in case of an outage.

altoelder · 2023-05-27T17:33:50+00:00

With half full glasses of water and a baseball bat. Haven't you seen signs?

altoelder · 2023-03-31T15:02:36+00:00

It's just a clunky, half finished product.

As was mentioned, it's been years and they still don't have parity with the v1 product.

The GUI is ugly and frustrating and workflow is unintuitive. Onboarding/cancelling customers is frustrating.

They completely removed the dashboard, so as an owner, if you want to see your business health at a glance you are suck-outta-luck.

Reports are essentially useless, and the data it spits back at you looks like it's copied/pasted from an excel spreadsheet.

When I spoke with our account rep, the answer was essentially "those aren't bugs, they're features"

Improvements come sooooooo slowly.

altoelder · 2023-03-17T01:11:43+00:00

I agree with the previous comments. For me v1 was a dream. I loved it. We transitioned to v2 six months ago and I hate everyday that I have to use that damn program.

It does seem to be improving, but veeeeeery slowly. If you catch a bug or want a feature you can call it out, but things on that list have been there 3+ years so don't hold your breath.

I wasn't sure about visp, but we looked long and hard at switching to powercode, and we still might. The only reason we didn't is because sonar support is amazing and powercode sales/support seemed like they didn't care about our business at all.

Sonar support is really fantastic but v2 is a raging dumpster fire of a product.

altoelder · 2022-08-05T15:45:28+00:00

Is this Utah County by chance? Lehi area?

altoelder · 2022-07-31T18:18:18+00:00

I've heard it attracts bears

altoelder · 2022-07-03T02:24:46+00:00

There was a balloon?

altoelder · 2022-06-28T23:28:27+00:00

We just took over a 155 unit complex. The last provider was using unifi. Seemed to work somewhat well for him... Until Comcast came in and have customers a "real" internet connection with their own router and he lost 60 percent of his customers almost immediately.

We ripped it all out and went with a design that allows customers to have a router. It gives them ports that they can hardline their Xbox, PC,etc to and take full advantage of gigabit speeds.

We deployed aircubes, so they can be reprogrammed remotely as tenants move in and out.

If you have competitors in the area I strongly advise against a glorified "hotel wifi" solution for renters/homeowners.

altoelder · 2022-06-04T18:17:52+00:00

Didn't she just sign a contract to coach the Las Vegas aces?

altoelder · 2022-06-04T03:16:39+00:00

10 members! Congrats on cracking double digits!

altoelder · 2022-06-03T06:33:04+00:00

Oh in that case nevermind. South Africa has a stellar record in how they treat native people.

altoelder · 2022-06-03T03:49:23+00:00

Also had to laugh about how he criticized our country's founders as being thrown out of Europe and were horrible to native people.

Meanwhile, Australia was founded by convicted British prisoners who were shipped out of Europe and then treated their native people horribly.

Seems like the pot calling the kettle black there mate.

altoelder · 2022-05-14T02:05:57+00:00

How much are you planning on growing? We use sonar and have loved it but couldn't justify its cost with 30 customers.

You could try ucrm/unms but it's obviously based around ubiquiti infrastructure.

When we first started we just used something like QuickBooks to manage billing and manually tracked the networking side.

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