I recently, well pre-vacation anyways, recieved some emails from some folks asking for more information on WiMAX setup and how to create an ISP based around this concept.

As I previously stated there are a few requirements to getting your own little wireless broadband provider up and running.

The joy of the current wireless revolution is that the big players (Rogers, Bell, Telus in Canada) have not truly established themselves so there is still room for rural players and smaller city based operations.

First off you need to move quickly the big telcos/cablecos are not sitting still. They are planning massive country wide rollouts but they are focussing on the big metropolitan areas (rightly so) as they have the most penatration and ability to cover large numbers of people with equivalent tower counts. For instance, two towers in Vancouver would cover much more potential subscribers than two towers here in Whitehorse.

To turn that negative into a postive, examine the fact that rural subscribers are more tolerant of coverage holes than city dwellers. There is a smaller initial roll-out cost (less hardware), there is less software support issues (if you centralize your servers), there is a smaller initial adoption of the service so the kinks can be worked out faster with less complaints. However, with all those positives, there are also the negatives of smaller potential subscription base, higher risk of non-adoption, increased logistics costs (shipping, local hardware support, etc) and increased support as they are the aforementioned coverage holes.

If you can create a turn-key operation that scales nicely to towns/communities of 5000 people and less you can easily corner an ignored market. The risk is higher but the liklihood of the big companies competing for small pieces of the pie are less, they are more concerned with keeping metropolitan market share.

Something to think on anyways.