Dear GKD Members, I come to you by way of an unusual coincidence and for that I am very grateful.
My name is Ken DiPietro and I am located in northern Vermont (US) right on the Canadian border. I started in the Personal Computer field in late 1981 and by 1987 I decided to start my own computer retailing and service business. In 1999 my wife and I decided to bring high speed Internet connectivity to our area of Vermont as it was unlikely that the bigger players would ever do so. After nearly a year of research, we launched our company, New-ISP.net, delivering high-speed Internet connectivity to businesses in our area using Fixed Wireless and SDSL technology. I am thrilled to be a part of this discussion and I have nothing but the deepest respect for people, like you, that are working to make this world a better place. It is my heartfelt intention to become a valuable resource to this group by providing technical expertise and the "hands on" experience necessary to help transfer both technology and the means to deploy it inexpensively where it needs to be implemented. So as you can all better understand my background, we built our company by a method known as "bootstrapping" - meaning that we had no outside investors and no real availability of working capital. In other words, we had nothing. This is something that I believe you all are very familiar with. However, with desire, ingenuity and innovation it is amazing what can be done with very little. Over the years we have developed a network of suppliers that can provide wireless equipment very inexpensively. I can reliably say that we can light up a town in our area for well under $3,000 all-inclusive. Since we are looking at using current technology in our installations in many cases the technology that we are using would be overkill and by implementing "outdated" technology we can provide suitable connectivity to a town for very little money relatively speaking. To give you a specific example, not including the upstream connection to the net, we can provide everything necessary to connect and distribute access to 10 points in a town (with specific RF requirements taken into account) for well under $1,000 total. While doing so, we are also creating a small business that would act as equipment manufacturer and installation service provider, for maintenance and as an ISP. While this sounds complicated I can assure you it is not and the entire process can be taught pretty quickly. I would welcome any requests for assistance either on-list or off-list and I will try to answer anyone's message in a timely fashion as completely as necessary. Thank you for allowing me access to such a wonderful group. I hope I can become a welcomed and valuable asset to you all. Respectfully, Ken DiPietro New-ISP NextGenCommunications ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
