Props from The Green Mountain State

Online friend and fellow energy independence enthusiast Tom Evslin writes a post on his Fractals of Change blog about our recent modest successes on Fire Island.   The prospects for Wireless ISPs are indeed improving, but you have to keep in mind the old Willie Keeler quote to "hit'em where they ain't", especially if you're deploying wi-fi at the edge of your network.  Wireless ISPs will still find their best prospects where T-1s are the only broadband available, or DSL is the only game in town.  Building out a network edge is primarily a real estate game, as the muni providers are finding out very painfully.

The current state of the practice in unlicensed networks is wi-fi, closely followed by a collection of proprietary gear lumped together as "Pre-WIMAX", and where trees are a problem, 900 MHz units are next best.  If you're trying to compete against a cable HFC network, you might be able to do it on price, but not performance, and if DSL is in the competitive mix, you've got a tough row to hoe in front of you. 

If you run cafe type hotspots, like my Urban Hotspots network, and you have good locations, people don't mind paying six bucks for a day of reliable access, or thirty for a month, so with a modest collection of spots, you can make a few fischnagels as long as you don't give away a quarter of your revenue to the outsourced hotspot operators, because you'll have to make deals with the venue owners because they want their cut too, those of them that "get" the value of having wi-fi, either as a paid service or a branded complimentary service.  A lot of venue owners still don't see the value of a professionally run network that can advertise their venue and give them another channel to interact with their customers, they'd rather just stick a linksys router on the end of a broadband connection and be done with it.

Update:
Steve Stroh picks up Tom's posting and posits what would happen if we marketed better.  My contention is marketing's not the problem, capital is.  VC's don't invest in utility businesses, which is what WISPs are, because they don't see the 5 x 10 times return in 5 years.  WISPs need to put together a solid ground game and use equipment lease financing and rolling returns back into the business to build up cash flows to the point where you can get creative with customer acquisition.  The WISP business is a mashup of the Cell Phone and Satellite TV business, it's all about location and zero churn to survive and thrive.