Jay - You've got a good point that I wasn't really thinking of - overall cost is a lot lower for infrastructure. I guess I was thinking about how much money Joe User would have to lay out to get his house hooked into the network. When I see the base price of $515 for the "Subscriber Module" that sits in the home, I can't see anyone really going for it that already has the phone lines and/or digital cable running through their house. However, given that DSL starts at a minimum of $39 for Qwest/MSN, and the DSL modem is an additional cost (or not depending on specials), there might be room to prorate the cost of the user's equipment out over the life of their use. What if TCWUG matched or bested the average dial-up rate - approximately $20 or so?? I don't know what you all pay for connectivity - I'm at $15 for dial-up, after paying through the nose for Roadrunner cable, I'm just fine for that. If I could get wireless, whatever the technical model might be, I'd be happy to shell out $20 a month for high speed. In a crazy way, this might be a sort of odd little entrepenuer opportunity - get together with 2 other people in your neighborhood - split the $2100 cost for a startup AP + 3 subscriber units, and split the cost of DSL to the AP. Hmmm... it's still darned expensive for a normal user to get it up and running. But once, you got over the hump, and had five or six other people sharing the costs, it'd probably be a money maker. I can take this offline if people think it's way off-topic and too commercial for TCWUG. - Nick -----Original Message----- From: tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org [mailto:tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org]On Behalf Of Austad, Jay Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 12:52 PM To: 'tcwug-list at tcwug.org' Subject: RE: [TCWUG] Richochet boxes? > Like you said, the prices are reasonable, that is if you have > that sort of cash laying around. It would be very cool to > develop neighborhood, and then possibly city-wide ISP type > networks where users could share the burden of equipment and > connection costs. The startup equipment costs for the end > user (for the canopy system) are pretty darned high compared > to cable, and even to DSL. Actually, this is much less than the startup costs for cable or DSL. With either of those, you have to have an existing cable or phone line infrastructure, neither of which is cheap. For all practical purposes, this is much much cheaper. > The question of money is pretty critical - if we, as the > TCWUG developed a city wide system, and then had end users > pay for access, we'd almost by definition have to be > non-profit. That's doesn't mean that we, collectively, > couldn't make money off of the idea, it's just a lot > different from your basic ISP startup who's sole purpose is > to make money, and preferrably lots of it. Onvoy started out at MRNet, which was a non-profit. After they got real big, they converted to a for-profit business. I don't know the steps involved in doing this, but it is possible. > made. But if we got in at the ground floor (or would that be > the second floor, altitude wise?), and established a presence > before Earthlink/AOL/whoever comes in and drops million$ on > the Twin Cities, this idea might just survive. Actually, that's exactly it. We wouldn't necessarily get getting in on the ground floor since there are a couple of other ISP's here in town that do this (Implex.net and sbwireless.net (or .com or .org, I forget which)). Even so, if we have an existing infrastructure when AOL/TW/Intel/whatever comes in, there's always the possibility to sell it to them rather than be put out of business. However, given the amount of freedom that AOL/TW/ATT Broadband current gives their customers, it would likely be very easy to compete against them. Just don't modify people's traffic, don't block anything, let them run servers, provide static IP's, and provide tiered service levels. All of these things are an improvement over ATT Broadband's shitty network, and if ATT came in and offered wireless, it's probably safe to say it's going to suck just as much as their cable modem service does. Jay _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Wireless Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.tcwug.org tcwug-list at tcwug.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tcwug-list