This is the real spirit of entrepreneurship. Hard work, learn quick, make mistakes, but get it done. With skin in the game rather than burning through investor money.

I hope to read more of these posts, but I know Chris cannot afford to spend a lot of time writing them. Nevertheless I'm looking forward to reading part 3 when it is posted in 18 months.

PS slight grammar nitpick: overtime != over time

I enjoyed reading the first part of this last year, and was thinking of it recently.

As someone who built a bootstrapped company from $40k/y revenue through $3.5M/year over 14 years, before we were shot in the head by our bank, I was thrilled to hear that you were doing something like this, but concerned over the many potholes (pun, I guess, intended) you were going to encounter. One of the biggest ones that was an eye opener for me early in starting and running Scalable was the rent seeking behavior of your suppliers. You wrote this as "Everyone wants a piece of the cake."

Yeah. That. It doesn't get better.

My comments for now are

1) beware of banks and debt instruments. If you can avoid personal guarantees on loans, then sure. Chances are they will say "no guarantee, no money". That money is extremely expensive to you. Avoid it like the plague.

2) beware "partners" and people/companies that claim to want to help you. Do due diligence, deeply, on any organization, including lawyers, accountants, etc. you might consider using. Most will waste your time.

3) hiring ... is ... critical. This is hard as a small co, as you generally can't find great people unless you have a pile of cash. You can try to turn who you can get into great people. But this only works if they are willing and able to learn.

4) Venture capital. Don't get me started.

I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything.

Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale.

I had a number of folks offer to buy the company. I was too stupid to realize that one should hit a number of singles and doubles to be able to get enough of a base to hit homers and grand slams.

Best of luck, and I've subscribed to the site now.

Great write-up. Great entrepreneurial tenacity. Would love more insight on the wireless challenges and how you tackle them? I wonder if a software monitoring app could detect increased noise and automate channel hopping.

Surely that must exist -- on the other hand, you mentioned the vendors do everything to lower the BOM, so perhaps they are lazy and this software is needed. Could be a good OSS project.

As a one-time dabbler in the local ISP business I found this fascinating but I also wanted to scream "Nooooo...stop" as I read! There are contractors who spend every day digging up streets, laying conduit. FFS use one of them to do the job rather than messing around looking for a Bobcat with the right Diamond saw attachment. Another thing I'd worry about is that there may be fiber in the ground or on poles already in this area -- currently not being used because there isn't a big enough market for service. In our town I am asked from time to time if the city should pay to "drop a fiber conduit in a trench they already dug for some other purpose, because this town has no fast Internet". I take them outside, point up at the fiber bundles running all around town on poles...

I was recently at BornHack2018, a small security camp for the 3rd summer this year held on the island of Bornholm.

The organisers also run BornFiber who are connecting the entire island with optical broadband.

BornFiber is a good example of how anyone with the right skill can start a fiber provider here in the nordics.

I'm glad to see this philosophy being adopted by the US.

However. Once they have fiber they still need some ISP and that's where the national ISPs come in. Thankfully we have plenty of options here but I hear things aren't as good in the US.

When deploying fiber, always lay down 10x what you need. Or calculate one fiber duct for each property on the way. So when more subscribers want to get connected you just have to dig at one point, cut one of the unused ducts and join it.

As someone whose only entrepreneurial idea is to open an ISP, this is a great read. I'd like to know how the councilman and the director of operations helped out. Did they expedite permits, waive fees, or something else?

It's really encouraging to see an effort like this happening in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area.

Having lived in Northeastern PA at various points in my life, I can attest that Internet speeds there have always kind of lagged behind. I knew people in more rural parts of the area who had basically zero wired internet options at all. It kind of just becomes something you learn to deal with.

Are there any grants or any kind of city money for work like what you're doing? I would think towns like Wilkes-Barre and Scranton would be bending over backwards to try and attract the sorts of businesses that would rely on infrastructure like what you're putting down. That you have to do all this with your own money and credit seems really wrong.

Inspiring story. Will be interesting to see what Chris is capable of if / when he's able to get access to more capital.

Are there VCs who invest in this sort of enterprise? The odds of getting a positive return seem favorable compared to many of the currently trendy software-only startups out there.

Also, I like Chris' tagline:

    Create value, not excuses.

200 subscribers with 90% coverage of a town-sized city (40k population)? sounds absolutely horrible.

but I really came here to comment on what I think is a financial error: rent vs buy cost. yeah, it seems more expensive to rent if you consider long term ownership of equipment, but this is very misguided. maintaining, repairing, insuring and just storing heavy equipment that you use rarely is just not the way to go. it's cheaper to rent.

> nothing to show for the nearly $10,000 in rental fees

you have no long term expenses to show for it. that's a wonderful tradeoff.

>We just launched in our 2nd city; Scranton, PA.

That's not... the Scranton, PA is it?

So what is his competitive advantage over the incumbent providers - the cable company and the phone provider?

Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...

Have you ever tried WeFunder or similar crowdfunded mechanisms to raise money? I would invest a few thousand at generous terms to support you guys and the mission, and I’m sure many others would too.

Thanks for sharing this! As someone in a fiberless city (Amsterdam), with a monopolistic local provider that's unwilling to expand, this is inspiring.

Great work so far Chris! Keep up the great work!

how do you deal with the legal aspect of running an ISP? What can the small players do?

> [Wireless] Speeds are competitive with cable (for now).

Latency, or just bandwidth?

I love reading these kinds of stories.

Keep them coming Chris, if you can :)

So Mimosa, one of the hardware vendors we use, does actually have this built-in to their firmware. The issue is, from what I've seen, is that it hops around too much. It also moves to congested channels sometimes. I'm sure there's a way to perfect it, we just don't have the time at the moment (I also don't believe they provide full API access yet, so I'm not even sure if we can change it without creating an automated UI tool that clicks around on a browser.)

From a WISP perspective you rarely want sector or horn antenna APs hopping to randomly chosen frequencies. Particularly if you have a well designed AB-AB back to back synced reuse or ABC frequency assignment pattern by azimuth. Any of this gear has a fairly full featured SNMP MIB and OID documentation so there are a lot of different backend operational support syetems you can use to monitor it.