The other issue is equipment... you are willing to spend $20k RIGHT NOW
for the license, but it would be at least a year before any equipment
was available, and then it would be $500 per CPE and $10k per base station.
A lot of the WISPs on this list spend an hour building a CPE to save $5.
You think they are going to buy $500 CPE? Of course the price would come
down, but that would be years from now.
You should consider that for $20k, you could easily put up 4 towers
using equipment that is available today, and cover those customers that
you are turning away, TODAY.
I have always said we need to get the customers signed up and installed
NOW. TODAY. If they can't get our service, they will go with something
else, and then they are gone forever. I have put up a new tower in a
single day (backhaul, AP, router, etc.) because we had an area that we
had two NOGO's (as we call them) in that area. We went back the next day
and installed those two customers.
Spend the money TODAY and use equipment that is available TODAY. Get
those customers installed TODAY.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Travis
Microserv
John Scrivner wrote:
Travis Johnson wrote:
John,
This is just my opinion, but I seriously doubt the FCC is just going
to "give" away 700MHz licenses, even on a per base station basis.
I never said they should "give" it to us. I said they should have base
station sized auctions. They can include an opening bid amount. They
always do.
And the WISP community is not going to spend even $5,000 per license
if they could.
I would spend $20K+ per base station license. I am not kidding. I
would do it in a heartbeat because I could make it back in one year
alone from not having to tell people NO when we could not get them
signal.
The cell companies will be bidding, and once again it will be in the
millions of dollars per region.
It is like farm ground. We are the farmers. None of us can farm if we
have to buy a million square acres of ground to farm. It is not fair.
It is exactly the same correlation and the FCC needs to hear it. (And
understand it which is a big stretch for them)
Honestly, what would you do if you were the FCC? Deal with hundreds
or thousands of little operators at $5,000 per license, or sell 3 or
4 licenses for the entire US for millions of dollars?
It is NOT about what is easier for them. It is a matter of what is
best for the country. Enabling thousands of new bustling and growing
entrepreneurs to build local wireless communication broadband
companies is the smartest thing they could do which is why they will
not do it.
Scriv
Travis
Microserv
John Scrivner wrote:
Apparently there is a meeting scheduled today, April 25, at the FCC
over how the 700 MHz band is going to be split up for auction. It
amazes me how we can be kept in the dark about these meetings. If
anyone can tell me how to get included on announcements of such
meetings I need to know about it. This really angers me that we are
not there with some representation today. If anyone reads this who
is near the DC area please go to this meeting and tell them we need
spectrum to be made available on a base station license basis. They
need to auction off individual base station licenses or reserve some
for a flat fee so all of us can compete. If they do not then
hundreds if not thousands of operators who are now serving rural
broadband will not be able to compete. This is an anti-competitive
problem that the FCC needs to address with this auction. This is a
big deal. If we do not get some 700 MHz or similar sub- 1 GHz
spectrum it is going to be very bad for us all.
Scriv
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