I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.
Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
> I get random cookies & care packages from people
I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.
Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.
I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.
I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.
We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)
Couldn’t have been anything older than a 386 as that was minimum spec even for Linux 1.0.
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.