A Story Of Good WISP Execution

Tom Evslin has written... or rather publicized an email from a WISP that Evslin makes into a great story, about Fire Island Wireless doing what WISPs do best - providing great service to their customers.

I've featured Tom's story on Broadband Wireless Internet Access Stories, and added Fire Island Wireless to Broadband Wireless Internet Access Service Providers.

On another blog, Evslin's correspondent Craig Plunkett discusses Evslin's mention of Fire Island Wireless.

One interesting thing is that Evslin hints that  "displacing DSL" is unusual, but then goes onto explain that Verizon, especially, isn't interested in investing more into DSL, especially in rural areas and how Plunkett shamelessly exploits that opening.

Imagine how well Plunkett would do if he did market and provide features like public IP addresses? He'd probably get more business than he could handle.

While that last comment probably comes off as sounding flip and snide, "more business than one can handle" is a very real, and perilous situation for WISPs. If they can't handle getting new customers online in a timely manner, the customers get irritated and talk bad about the WISP. But, handling "surges" is expensive for WISPs. But if WISPs are to survive and thrive, they must become adept and responsive as Plunkett has become to capitalize on opportunities.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged.)

Comments

[Craig Plunkett]

Thanks for the mention Steve, but marketing is not our problem, we get plenty of inbound leads without trying too hard thanks to organic search results. Surges are an issue, but what is the real issue is the CPE cost. Users don't care so much about public IPs, they care about reliability, speed, and price, in that order. Imagine what I could do if I had the capital to amortize the CPE cost over a 3 year contract to get the customer to have a zero down startup, that's the real bottleneck. Nobody's been willing to commit substantial capital towards building WISPs yet.