Physical Site Survey

A physical site survey involves driving around in potential coverage areas and scanning the buildings, water towers, grain silos and other tall structures for existing wireless antennas. This step will give you a good idea of where existing wireless equipment is located and what slice of wireless spectrum they are using to deliver service. It should also give you a list of potential sites to be considered for building out your own wireless antenna cell sites.

Wireless Site Survey

Once you have eliminated cell sites with existing wireless equipment and found several potential spots with good elevated positions near large groups of customers, it is time to conduct a wireless site survey with a spectrum analyzer to see what levels of radio noise are in the area. Sites should be scanned for 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5GHz. If new public frequencies are avialable, these should be scanned as well. In addition to raw frequencies, you should scan for polarization. The noise levels on vertical polarization might be very saturated, while horizontal polarization might be completely open.

Planning Wireless Cell Sites

Other decisions that need to be made are how big will your cell coverage areas need to be and how many simultaneous customers should be allowed to logon to the network at the same time. These decisions will determine the best vendor's equipment for the job. Planning also requires that WISPs contact potential site owners to see what type of requirements need to be met before equipment can be installed such as wind and insurance.

Contracting Space on Existing Cell Towers

If large cell towers are already built and have space available for your equipment, you should check on the pricing. In most cases, cell phone towers will be too expensive for beginner Wireless ISPs, but it is worth a couple of phone calls to check it out.

Assessing Broadband Demand in Target Coverage Area

Once you have selected your wireless cell sites, preferrably near large groups of potential customers, you should verify broadband demand exists before making capital investments.

Before building out a 1,000 home neighborhood, conduct a doorhanger marketing campaign that tells potential customers that if 100 customers sign up for service, your company will have enough business to build a wireless broadband network. You might even offer a discount to the first 100 customers that sign up.

Make sure you provide a way to sign up for service, such as a phone number, website site or email address. If you get 200 responses, you are sitting on a gold mine. If you get one phone call, you should think twice.

If any customers inform you that they already have cable or DSL service, do not try to compete in these areas. You will lose a price war every time. If you can find areas where customers are starving for broadband, your business will be very successful.

Building a Business Plan

If you get a good customer response to your survey, you are ready to put all of your facts and figures into a written busienss plan. The plan should cover cell sizes, customer penetration goals, marketing costs, equipment costs and personnel costs related the construction and daily operations of the network.

Building a Marketing Plan

Most people don't plan properly for the marketing portion of their business model. You should always plan on doing advertising, direct mail, and public relations campaigns to make sure customers are aware that high-speed Internet service is available in their area.

Wireless Training for Proper Engineering Principles

Before attempting to build a wireless network, take some training classes that will teach you how to calculate a wireless link budget. Regardless of what type of wireless network you want to build out, you will always need to know how strong your base stations antennas are and how strong the customers antennas will need to be in order to talk back to the base station.

Planning for Proactive Network Management

Making sure that your network is avaiable to all customers at all times is mission critical. Before selling service, have a team of beta testers stress test it to make sure that everything is working properly. Once the network is operational, provide proactive 24x7 network management that continually scans the system for equipment that is becoming congested or has failed completely. Always try to stay one step ahead of the customer. If there is a problem, be prepared to let customers know why and when the network will be up and running.

Planning for Superior Customer Technical Support

On the customer's side of the network, have trained technical support people waiting solve their problems as quickly as possible. Remember, once you touch a user's computer, they will always assume that your network is what caused it to crash. Make sure that you have clear documentation that shows where your network support ends and where they can go to get support for their computer and software applications.