Note: This was originally published March 11, 2020 on my personal blog chrishacken.com. I accidentally (or purposely?) deleted the virtual machine that it was running on sometime in early 2024. I decided to recover the article from archive.org and repost it below for posterity.

As someone who grew up throughout the 90's and 00's, some of my fondest memories stem from progressive advancements in internet and computing technologies. Upgrading from Dial-Up internet to DSL was a grand event in our house. I remember my brother and I fighting over the computer day in and day out to play games like Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, which was released in 2003. (I'm convinced that this will be the all-time best FPS game ever created.) At around the same time, we upgraded to one of the best Dell computer's available at the time. It had 512MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor. This was a major upgrade from our Compaq Celeron, which had something like 64MB of RAM.

Eventually, the grandeur of DSL faded as the rest of the world began to adopt Cable and Fiber internet. It wasn't until I briefly moved to Philadelphia that I was finally able to experienced what I had been missing out on. In college I lived in a neighborhood that was one of Verizon's first Fios builds. I was absolutely blown away by the 25 Mbps connection. This was in 2009. I'm amazed that over a decade later, in 2020, some households still don't have access to cable or fiber internet yet.

Like many of our customers do now, I could never figure out why it was so difficult to get us fiber service. The cable is cheap, just throw it up on a pole and give me internet! Right? Well, not so fast...

A quick overview of how utility services are run and the challenges involved...

As most people know, there are primarily two ways to deliver utility services to a home or business. Aerial and underground. Water, gas, and sewer are always serviced underground for obvious reasons. Electric, telephone, cable, and fiber have the ability to either be above or below ground.

Aerial.

As with anything else, aerial has pro's and con's.

The pro's are primarily upfront costs (this is debatable) and speed of deployment (this is also debatable).

The con's are that contrary to it being cheaper to physically deploy, the pole owners generally charge up-front make ready fee's. These fees can range from $0 to upwards of $50,000/mile. It's essentially pay to play. If we want to attach to 50 poles, the pole owner might determine that 10 of those poles are old and need to be replaced before we can attach to them. Rather than fork up the cash themselves, they'll force us to pay to replace their poles in order to approve the attachment.

In addition to that, there are the annual pole fee's. Depending on your agreement, we've seen pole fee's ranging anywhere from $7/pole per year all the way up to $43/pole per year with 10% annual increases (I'm looking at you PPL. This ridiculous rate was purely intended to keep us from attaching to their poles, IMO. It's impossible to make money with these rates).

Another con is that even though installing the cable on poles is faster, it usually takes the pole owner around 6 months just to review applications and to determine make ready requirements and costs. As an example, if we have fiber on a pole that's 1 pole short from being able to service your house, it would take at least 6 months just to run fiber to that one additional pole. So close, yet so far.

Underground.

Like aerial, underground has its own list of pro's and con's.

When you install a service underground, you own it for life. There are no annual fee's. You pay one time to install it and you're set for life. This sounds like a pro, but it's also a con. When we run metro conduit, it generally costs us between $15-25/ft (not including customer drops). For the sake of argument, let's assume we're at the high-end of our costs. If we install 1,000ft of conduit, that's $25,000 that we need to pay out of pocket upfront. Some blocks have upwards of 30 customers, but others have as little as 5. Let's average it out at 20 customers per block, that's $1,250 upfront per customer, assuming we get every single customer. Conservatively, we're initially looking at a 50% take rate. This could grow to 100% overtime, but we never make that assumption. So that's $2,500/customer. Imagine spending $2,500 per house/building and then have them tell you that your $69/m service is too expensive. Generally speaking, we won't do a street unless our numbers look better than this, but this is a realistic scenario as we scale and get access to cheaper capital, etc.

Politics

Cost issues aside, there are a number of other hurdles one needs to get past just to begin the process of building out a network. You'd think that risking everything you have in an effort to bring your local economy into the 21st Century would be a welcome sight. That's what I thought too; was I wrong. While there are plenty of supporters (I truly appreciate you all), there are just as many, if not more, critics.

We've been fortunate enough to have had a handful of people get behind us overtime and give us a shot. I'm sure others haven't had it so easy. I know this because even after we've become an established player in our city throughout the past 4 years, neighboring townships and municipalities haven't been as opened armed to welcome us into their communities as I had anticipated or would have liked.

I'll go into more detail on small government policies that really hamper our ability to deploy underground later below.

Too Many Opinions

I'm generally a big fan of individual citizens trying to make an impact in their communities. However, in too many cases these contributions seem to be made in the form of unproductive complaints rather than productive feedback or action. Far too many people have a say in things that they probably shouldn't.

Case A.

A new customer had recently signed an agreement with us to run fiber into their building. This is a non-profit who's members are selflessly donating their time to restore a landmark in the community. Upon receiving their signature, I notified the city that we would be pulling a permit to connect the building in question to our underground network. They said okay; that was that. Our nearest existing hand hole is approximately 90ft to the right of the new customer's property; in front of another property. As a courtesy, I notified the manager of that establishment to let her know that we would be performing work over the weekend, from Friday into Saturday. They're closed Saturday and Sunday so I had assumed they would appreciate the notice and possibly even sign up with us. The project would involve removing 90ft of sidewalk, running conduit, and then restoring the sidewalk with brand spankin' new concrete. The total timespan that this would occur, from when our shovel hit the ground to having new sidewalks in place, would be 48 hrs. The response that I received from a member of their organization made me facepalm.

Not long after receiving this email, I became aware that they didn't even own the building in question, nevermind the sidewalk. They lease it. This was eventually "resolved" after a series of negotiations between the non-profit's president and the establishment in question. Often times we aren't as lucky.

We initially planned to have this new customer installed within a week of them signing the contract. Now it will end up being around 2 months from start to finish. Long story short, I learned my lesson in trying to be courteous.

Case B.

Last year we were installing conduit for our fiber optic network. There were countless instances where people would literally stop their cars, roll down their windows, and yell profanities at us. In what world is that acceptable behavior for an adult? I can't imagine being so far off my rocker that I would feel the need to yell at a bunch of construction workers trying to build a fiber optic network (not that they had any idea what we were doing). If these are the types of people influencing decisions, there's something wrong.

City workers have a tough job fielding complaints from people like this and I commend them for it. It shouldn't affect policy though.

Case C.

In another incident that took place not long, maybe a day or two, after Case B above. A local store owner came back to us as we're swinging pick axes in 95 degree heat telling us we need to hurry up and we should hire more workers. "My customers keep calling saying there's no where to park." Mind you, we're standing right next to a massive parking lot that is approximately 1/3rd full. I made my best attempt to kindly explain that paying 3 guys to stand around a hole to watch one person hand-dig to expose a utility isn't going to make our work go any faster. I don't think he liked my response.

The Consequences

In many cases, resident complaints are justified. Utility providers need to be held accountable for shitty restoration work. However, the way in which bad restoration work is being combated is counter productive. There has been a huge increase in curb-to-curb restoration requirements by local governments. Essentially what these rules state is that anytime a utility cuts asphalt beyond a predetermined length, say 100ft, they are then responsible for replacing the entire road surface from the curb on the left side of the street to the curb on the right side of the street. I believe some municipalities are also trying to introduce these measures to offload the costs of repaving roads themselves, similar to how pole owners force you to replace their aging utility poles under their make-ready requirements. (One municipality told me as much when I attended a local council meeting in an effort to get them to waive this ridiculous ordinance for us.)

These policies will ultimately do more harm than good. For us, these are the one and only thing preventing us from providing superior fiber internet services in these areas. Forcing curb-to-curb asphalt restoration essentially doubles our cost to provide service. Apart from that, policies like these are going to force other utility owners to wait as long as possible before doing any utility repairs. We've already seen one instance locally where the gas company put off repairs to a leaking gas line and was later fined several million dollars. This utility company is/was also involved in a lawsuit with a neighboring city who had recently passed a curb-to-curb policy.

The way this issue should be handled is to hold utilities accountable for bad restoration work. If you fine utilities for potholes, they will then be encouraged to restore their pave cuts properly the first time. This has recently been Wilkes-Barre City's approach and, if enforced properly, is a much more effective balance of encouraging infrastructure upgrades while also appeasing residents.

We've trenched thousands of feet and have restored the asphalt without any potholes or additional repair work. Two examples of such are below.

Federal Broadband Funding

This is another tid-bit that I want to throw in before I wrap up this post. Recently, the FCC and USDA, among others, have created massive funds in an effort to deploy broadband in underserved areas. This has been an admirable effort. However, if you take a look at where all of that money has traditionally gone, it's mostly all going to ILEC's and a handful of large CLEC's. Most of these programs have dished out funding before small ISP's like ourselves, who don't have the resources to actively seek out programs like these, have even been made aware of their existence.

Those who have received funding are either large wireless ISP's whom have deployed sub-par wireless service (I'm sure it's better service than what was previously available, but broadband usage will outgrow those technologies within a few years.) or are ILEC's who basically squandered away the money with very little to show for it. I recall seeing figures in excess of $5,000/home, which is absolutely batshit insane.

I'm a part of several small online communities of fiber internet providers who deploy fiber networks at small fractions of the cost of what the big guys do. Those are the companies that are deploying in rural areas and who can provide the most bang for the buck in regards to rural access.

Conclusion

I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like many of these policies will never change. I sent a friend this write up shortly after drafting it. His response was this, "the read is so funny, because its the exact struggles we had in allentown trying to lay fiber in the early 2000's.
Literally nothing has changed". Providers faced this same issue 20 years ago. If they were allowed to proceed under more favorable policies, all of those roads would have been repaved 2-3 times over by now and everyone would have fiber internet.

My hope is that at least one policy maker reads this post and can better grasp the challenges that face small ISP's. There's a reason that most communities have only one internet provider. It's not that no one wants to enter your market, it's usually that the policies in place make it near impossible to do so.

(What's funny is a neighboring official was under the impression that the local cable company had exclusivity; I corrected him and informed him that it has been illegal to provide or enforce exclusive franchise agreements since 1996.)

Note: This was originally published September 09, 2018 on my personal blog chrishacken.com. I accidentally (or purposely?) deleted the virtual machine that it was running on sometime in early 2024. I decided to recover the article from archive.org and repost it below for posterity.

Nearly 2 years ago I wrote Starting an Internet Service Provider. When I sat down to write that post I initially intended it to be a weekly or monthly log of events to look back on, but it turned into one long blog post about the struggles of starting an ISP. That post ended up receiving over 20,000 visits in one day while at the top of Hacker News and roughly 40,000 total. I obviously haven't written weekly or monthly since then; mainly due to lack of time.

NEPA Fiber has come a long way since I first wrote about it 2 years ago. Perhaps the biggest change is our name. I decided to rebrand from NEPA Fiber to Loop Internet. Most out-of-towners didn't know what NEPA was (an acronym for Northeastern Pennsylvania) and I also wanted to eventually expand outside of NEPA. I don't remember how the name Loop came to be, but I do remember bouncing the name off of a girl I was seeing at the time. She liked it, I liked it, and that was good enough for me. Loop Internet was born (or reborn?).

I've had some second thoughts about the name since then. At the time, deploying physical fiber didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon and having the word "fiber" in our name just seemed wrong. On the other hand, you'd be surprised at how many people don't even know what fiber is. Regardless, I committed to Loop, so Loop it is.

What's changed?

• Our MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) has quadrupled.
• We've grown to nearly 200 subscribers (mainly businesses)
• We just launched in our 2nd city; Scranton, PA.
• Our network coverage area has grown drastically. We went from being able to service maybe 10-20% of our first city, Wilkes-Barre, PA, to now covering nearly 80-90%.
• Our wireless reliability doesn't suck anymore.
• We now offer Gigabit service in several properties.
• We now offer fiber service in several dozen properties.

What hasn't changed?

• Wireless spectrum is still a huge issue. This is one of the main reasons we're focusing on fiber now.
• Wireless reliability still kind of sucks (I'm aware I contradicted myself from above. Read on to "the wireless struggle" in the next section for an explanation under the pro's/con's list. Tl;dr; It's a spectrum (or lack-thereof) issue.)
• This shit's expensive.

The Wireless Struggle

I've learned A LOT about wireless since my last post. A lot about interference, shielding, spectrum, and wireless network design.

I try not to hate on wireless too much because it got us to where we are, but it's a pain in the ass to maintain a reliable network.

Pros:

• Wireless is affordable.
• Speeds are competitive with cable (for now).

Cons:

• Spectrum is and probably always will be a major barrier for WISP's. (See more on my wireless spectrum rant below).
• Wireless is completely dependent on the terrain. Wireless works okay in some areas and is totally unfeasible in most other areas (trees = bad).
• Wireless radios are susceptible to various environmental factors. We've had squirrels chew through wires, tornado gusts and nearby lightning strikes take out antennas.
• All PoP's need battery backup units that can run for extended periods of time (>24 hrs). The costs of deploying and maintaining extended runtime battery backup units really add up when you have over a dozen micro-PoP's.
• WISP equipment is cheaply made in order to make it affordable; failure rates are fairly high over time.
• Everyone wants a piece of the cake. Property owners with buildings ideal for wireless equipment want hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to place our equipment on their roofs. It takes 10 subscribers at $50/m just to break even on a $500/m roof lease (not including the equipment, labor, materials, etc). Most of our antennas have less than 10 subscribers on them. The math obviously doesn't work out.

I'm clearly a little bias against wireless, but I feel it's for good reason. When you're operating in an urban environment, unlicensed equipment makes life hell. We frequently have to move wireless channels on antennas (every few days in some cases) in order to resolve speed/service issues. Some channels will be wide open for a week and then out of no where one end of the link will pick up interference at -60dBm. We then have to move the equipment to another channel and repeat every few days. We've been able to react quickly to these sorts of issues in order to continue growing, but it's not ideal.

It's also fairly difficult to find and train techs who are willing and able to install equipment in some fairly sketchy locations. I've literally jumped from the top of a 32ft ladder onto a hook-ladder in order to install a receiver on the peak of a roof before. I would obviously never ask, nor allow, a tech to do that on their own; but when you're growing and you have everything on the line, sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze (I'd never do that again, btw. I'm lucky I didn't die.)

In general, wireless creates a whole slew of challenges. We've had to mount receivers on the tops of 30ft monopoles. Buying a bucket truck doesn't really make sense unless we were to use it daily. Renting one makes these types of one-off installations fairly expensive and kill our ROI.

Wireless Spectrum Rant

There are two "genre's" of wireless for point-to-multipoint applications. Licensed and Unlicensed. If you're operating in a rural area, you may be looking at obtaining a 3.5Ghz or 3.65Ghz license. You'll have a leg up in interference, reliability, and signal penetration (trees), but you'll likely be far behind the competition in terms of speed. From my real-world testing, you shouldn't really expect to get more than 30-40 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up in a typical scenario. If you're competing with DSL, that's perfectly acceptable and you can win over most subscribers. If you're competing with cable services you probably won't be able to make much of a dent; especially with DOCSIS 3.1 being deployed now.

If you're like us and are deployed in a more urban environment, the only spectrum that can truly compete with cable and fiber is unlicensed spectrum (unless you have millions of dollars and can win some in an FCC auction). Our network runs on a combination of 5 Ghz, 11 Ghz, 24 Ghz, 60 Ghz, and 80 Ghz equipment. 11 Ghz is licensed and 80 Ghz is lightly licensed. You can only use that spectrum in Point to Point links, so we use that primarily for our back-haul to connect our PoP's together.

As wireless and 5G become more prominent and as more services move to mobile, I believe WISP's will be left in the dark as large mobile carriers use their influence and money to horde high-bandwidth "5G" spectrum.

Transitioning to Fiber

My dream has always been to deploy fiber. It has taken nearly 3 years of persistent nagging, emails, and meetings to finally get the chance to do so. I can't thank Wilkes-barre City Councilman, Tony Brooks and Wilkes-Barre's Director of Operations, Butch Frati enough for their help in making this dream come true.

When we first began our transition from a pure wireless provider to a fiber provider towards the end of 2017 and into the Spring of 2018, we had run some fiber from a building already serviced by a 80Ghz 5 Gbps point-to-point link, down the pipe-chase of the building, and then out the back of the building to the neighboring buildings which are connected. That's one of several short-cuts we've taken in order to provide <$1,000 1 Gbps circuits. The service is just as reliable as it's pure fiber counterpart, but at a substantial costs savings to the end-user and ourselves.

About 3-4 months ago we began deploying fiber conduit in the public right of way in Wilkes-Barre, PA. The orange line in the below map shows our current fiber conduit network from the project. The original project spanned 3 blocks and we are now beginning to build off of that network. The purple dots are some of the multi-tenant buildings in our network, most of which are serviced via wireless.

I always knew running fiber was expensive. As an entrepreneur your job is to figure out how to do something better, faster, and for less. I thought we'd be able to do that. I was wrong. Not wrong in the sense that we can't do it, but wrong that we could do it on our first try. We made a number of mistakes. The good news is we learned from them and I'm confident we can avoid them as we move forward. The bad news is, those mistakes cost money; a lot of it.

When we started this project I budgeted around $30,000. I've honestly lost track of the costs because we've been working to complete it under whatever means necessary due to our time constraints. I think when it's all said and done that it'll end up costing around twice that.

My biggest mistake was starting the project without ample funding. I tried to fund the project primarily through our existing subscription revenue and through a large cabling contract I had received months earlier. Realistically, we required around $100k to buy the equipment we needed. Had we had adequate funding I would have bought the equipment we rented: a skid steer breaker attachment, a concrete saw, and also a few other tools that we didn't rent but plan to buy in the future to make the process faster and more efficient; such as a vacuum excavator and boring machine. The project would have cost around the same, but we'd own several assets that we'd be able to use again in the future. Instead, we have nothing to show for the nearly $10,000 in rental fees we were charged over the period of 3-4 months.

The project began as a 3-block run, approximately 3,200 ft in all. The local gas company was replacing a leaky gas line that runs down the street. Per an ordinance put into place by City Council, once a street is repaved no one can work in it again for ~5 years without repaving it curb to curb. For us, this was a unique opportunity to get some conduit in the ground without having to pay to restore the street. However, the street was being restored immediately after the gas company's project was completed, so we had a limited window to get in and out.

The project began as a 3-block, 3,200ft, fiber run. By the time we're done we will have dug up about a mile of road and deployed approximately 8,000ft of conduit. As you can tell by that math, we decided early on that if we were going to dig up the road we might as well put ample conduit in the ground for future expansion purposes. The last thing we want to do is run out of room in the conduit and have to dig up the same road again in the future. We put two 2" pieces of conduit along the the majority of the route; while most end-user connections have a single piece of 2" ran to them.

Rough Beginnings

I ran into one HUGE issue that delayed us for over a month, as well as some other minor inconveniences.

First, the major issue. I'm a firm believer that buying equipment you plan to use regularly, or for a long duration, is almost always better than leasing. You own the physical equipment, you can use it whenever you want, and it pays for itself overtime. You have a physical asset in which you can chose to either hold onto or sell, usually at a net profit compared to renting.

I don't have the best credit because I hold a lot of the business' debt under my own name. Let's just say that I have every ounce of skin in the game. Therefore, getting financing to buy the equipment we need generally isn't an option.

This entire project was put together at the last minute so I contacted our local Cat dealer about 3 weeks before our planned start date to reserve a wheel saw for our skid steer. A wheel saw is basically a giant saw blade with teeth that cuts through the ground. You may be familiar with the term "micro-trenching". He said they had one and to come pick it up in 2-3 weeks when we're ready. So 3 weeks later I call back to pick it up and they don't have it; it's out on rent. I ask if they can find me another one. He tells me that he can't search other dealers inventory. I called another dealer, they don't have one either, but he tells me he sees that another dealer in Pittsburgh has one (not sure why the hell the first guy told me he can't search other dealer inventory). I then fill out some financial paperwork that the first guy never told me about, get approved for $5,000 on NET30 terms, and get the Wheel Saw shipped to our local Cat dealer.

About a week later, we pick up the wheel saw and bring it to the job site. I pick it up with our Case 95XT and immediately there are a few issues. 1) Having never used an attachment that required electronic controls before, I had no idea each skid steer manufacturer had their own unique electronic PIN hookup. They all have universal hydraulic adapters, why not have universal electronic controls. 2) The teeth, which lock the attachment onto the skid steer, don't fit in the attachment; they're about 1/4" too wide for the opening. Again, these are supposed to be universal on every skid steer, I'm still not sure why they didn't fit.

The first issue could likely be solved by moving the pins around. The 2nd issue can't be fixed. I can't exactly use a grinder on an attachment I don't own. So at this point I'm panicking. I already rented the concrete saw and breaker from Sunbelt rentals for close to $2,000/m. We already started prepping the road by breaking up and removing parts of the sidewalk where we need to put hand holes in, I already have the hand holes (boxes that you pull the conduit into) on-site, and we already have $3,000 worth of conduit sitting on the road. I'm in this for close to $8,000 at this point and we might not even be able to dig.

At this point I'm ready to go all-in, let's just get it done. The Case dealer told us that ordering a Wheel Saw through them would take 6-8 weeks. He knew for sure that that one would fit our Case skid steer, but we didn't have that kind of time at our disposal. We were supposed to be done with the entire project by the time we'd receive the saw. I then contacted some Bobcat dealers to see if they knew if their Wheel saw attachment would fit a Case. No one was really able to give me a straight answer. I was told that even if the electronic adapter didn't work, they sell a separate control box that would by-pass our skid-steer's electronics altogether. We were already about a month behind schedule at this point; fuck it, tell me where to sign.

After applying to numerous financial institutions, no one would give the company a loan for the attachment. When in doubt, turn to mom. My mom co-signed the loan and about a week later we now owned a Bobcat WS18 attachment. The attachment was around $20,000 and I think I paid around $1,000 upfront. Our payments are only around $795/m at 0% financing for 24 months. A far cry from the $2,800/m it would have cost to rent one.

The issues weren't over yet. No one has the electronic adapter in stock and they had to special order it and make one just for us. It was going to be another 10-14 days. We couldn't wait that long. The Bobcat dealer offered to let us rent a skid steer at a fair rate. At this point I had lost track of how much money we had invested into this project, we just needed to start cutting, so I take him up on the offer.

Finally Rolling

We started cutting the next day. Progress was very very slow in the beginning. We weren't aware that there was nearly 12in of concrete below the asphalt. There was a fair bit of a learning curve both with the wheel saw, finding the appropriate cutting teeth, and with our technique. We tried numerous things to get the saw to cut faster and eventually we determined the most efficient way to cut, do utility locates, and dig the holes for our hand holes. In the beginning it took us nearly 2 weeks just to do one intersection. In the past 2 weeks, we cut an entire block.

The city allowed us to use flowable fill (concrete with a very low PSI) to restore our trench since the road is being repaved afterwards.

Other Issues & PR

There are some other details that I skipped over above. We had numerous issues with the Case skid steer. Between the day we started breaking concrete and cutting to around the 2nd week on the project we had replaced just about every hydraulic hose there is on the machine.

Throughout the project we've had a few run-ins with property owners and commuters who have complained about the project. It's very hard not to lose motivation or get agitated when you've gone all-in on a project, who's only real goal is to improve the city, and then get numerous complaints because people need to wait an extra 2 minutes in slightly congested traffic during rush-hour or because you've dug up their sidewalk temporarily.

I've also found that no matter how well you fence off your holes and fresh concrete, there's always someone who will write their name in the concrete, step in it, or knock the barriers over.

We still have another week or two until we completely wrap up this project, so I may make another post after we try pulling cable through the conduit. That'll be the ultimate test of whether we had a good deployment design or not, as a few of the runs were ~500ft and others had a fair amount of high-angled bends.

Note: This was originally published February 19, 2017 on my personal blog chrishacken.com. I accidentally (or purposely?) deleted the virtual machine that it was running on sometime in early 2024. I decided to recover the article from archive.org and repost it below for posterity.

I decided to start writing about the day-to-day obstacles we face at NEPA Fiber. Before I begin to make regular write ups on our progress, I feel it's necessary to explain the backstory of how it all began and where we are now.

Why?

The first time I put some serious thought into starting an Internet Service Provider (ISP) was when I had just returned home after being dropped from Officer Candidates School (OCS) in the Marine Corps. I had endured the most difficult 8 weeks of my life, both physically and mentally, and wasn't sure what was next. Although I didn't graduate from OCS, my time there taught me that I was capable of enduring much more than I ever thought I was.

My parents have been nothing but supportive in everything I do. When I returned home from OCS they encouraged me not to jump into anything too soon, but rather to take some time off to figure out what I wanted to do. I had a pretty substantial tech background; I worked at a datacenter, was a software engineer, and started and sold a small web hosting service prior to embarking on my short-lived journey in the Marine Corps. Like my decision to join the Marine Corps, I wanted to do something meaningful that positively impacted peoples lives. I also wanted the freedom to make my own schedule and not be locked into a 9-5 desk job.

Internet options in Northeastern Pennsylvania have historically been atrocious. It wasn't until most of the country had cable internet that we finally had DSL; and it wasn't until most of the country had access to fiber that we finally had cable internet. I spent my entire childhood using Dial-up(50 Kbps) internet and then DSL (1 Mbps). It wasn't until I moved to Philadelphia that I was hit in the face by what the rest of the country had access to. In 2010 I was likely among some of the very first subscribers to Verizon Fios; sadly that all came to an end when I left Philadelphia and moved back home. It became fairly obvious that although NEPA was once one of the wealthiest areas in the country, we were now living in the dark ages and something needed to change.

After returning home for the second time, I again took notice that nothing had improved. With my experience working in a datacenter and running a web hosting company, I felt I had the knowledge and skill set necessary to be the change I wanted to see happen in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

How?

It's been quite a ride since I started NEPA Fiber in the fall of 2015.

I began by searching for properties in Wilkes-Barre that would serve as our first office. I had two requirements for choosing a location:

• Must have access to fiber.
• Must be located at a high-point that has line-of-sight to much of the city and surrounding areas.

The property needs fiber for obvious reasons and I also needed a location with good line-of-sight to most of Wilkes-barre in order to serve customers using wireless equipment. My long-term goal has always been to deploy fiber, but wireless was a good MVP solution to help kickstart the business as well as validate the business model.

While reviewing Zayo's network map for preexisting fiber, I found out that 65 Public Square, a 14 story high-rise on public square, already had lit fiber on-site. That seemed like my best bet to get started. On November 22, 2015 I sent out a brief inquiry to Jeff, who owns and manages the building;

Good afternoon,

We're potentially interested in renting some space on the building for antennas. Could you pass on some pricing information?

Thanks,

He replied within the hour. We met the next day and were able to workout a deal that I was able to live with. I was nervous as hell. Between our fiber from Zayo and the building lease I had committed to $2,000/month in overhead with absolutely zero revenue. Everything I had ever read about starting a business told me to start with no less than a years worth of runway; yet here I was starting an ISP, perhaps the most capital intense business on the planet, on nothing more than credit cards and about $2,500 in cash.

Going Live!

Fast forward to January 22, 2016 and Zayo still did not have our service ready for us and money was flying out of the door from equipment purchases and our building lease. I decided to search for a temporary solution to get up and running ASAP. It turned out that a tenant from BurstNet, a datacenter I used to work at, moved in next-door several years earlier. I got in touch with him to buy some bandwidth so that I could get up and running. It wasn't until a month later that we were finally up.

Between when we first went live on February 22, 2016 and when our Zayo link went live on April 28, 2016 we had numerous reliability issues from the neighbor we temporarily bought bandwidth from. They performed a rather half-assed cable run between their building and where our equipment was located; this resulted in the cable breaking on at least 3 separate occasions. In each instance we were down for over an hour. They were instrumental in getting us online early, but I was extremely happy to remove ourselves from their network.

Started From The Bottom

When I started NEPA Fiber I literally had nothing. No equipment, no tools, and no truck. I borrowed my friends truck to transport a ladder or put a foldable ladder in my car when installing our first 7 or 8 customers.

Overtime I slowly acquired all of the installation tools, networking equipment, wireless equipment, and took a loan out to buy the NEPA Fiber mobile. In 2016 alone, I spent upwards of $40,000.

I'm also fortunate enough to have some amazing friends who helped put up our first antennas on our tower in 35 degree weather.

Wireless Issues

I knew from the beginning that wireless wasn't a long term solution, but it has been particularly frustrating to keep the equipment running issue-free.

It works great when it works, but every once in awhile some of the gear will lock up for seemingly no reason. I'm about 85% sure it's an issue with static-electricity building up in the devices, but there's nothing I can do to resolve it; it's a design flaw.

The other issue with wireless is that we're quickly on a path to capacity and quality of service issues. We have roughly 40 wireless clients all sending and receiving from the same building; that means the spectrum around our primary office is getting fairly crowded and the equipment is becoming more and more susceptible to interference between devices. This is avoidable to an extent by using some smart channel techniques. I have yet to receive an actual quality of service complaint, but I feel that it's only a matter of time before I start seeing some service quality related issues.

Calculated Risks

One of the necessary evils in bootstrapping a company is taking calculated risks. NEPA Fiber is completely bootstrapped and self-funded. Unlike VC backed startups, I don't have the luxury of trading profitability for growth. It's either make money or die.

One of those calculated risks involved starting an internet company with only one upstream provider. This basically means that when Zayo goes down, we go down. It seems pretty silly for an internet provider to rely on a single upstream provider, but when the cost of adding a second provider is mid-high $x,xxxx/month, it's not really a choice.

My worst nightmare struck. Not once, but twice.

On August 31st, our service had gone down for approximately 11 hours. Zayo had scheduled maintenance on our link for midnight that night, so when I received an alert from our system that our network was down at approximately 12am, just after we received the "Maintenance Start" notification, I had every reason to assume it was due to the maintenance. However, when I woke up at around 6am, our network was still down. It turns out that one of the networking cards on the SONET for our service had failed in the middle of the night. Our service had come up after the maintenance, but then went right back down. By the time Zayo drove up to Wilkes-Barre from their offices in Allentown to service the equipment it was 11am before we were back online.

Exactly one month later my luck struck again. On September 29 at 5:55pm, I received an alert from our system that our network was down. I immediately called Zayo and they told me that they were receiving dozens of similar reports and that they were dispatching a team. At around 9pm that night we were told that construction at the new Comcast building (ironic, right?) had severed conduit containing a 144 strand fiber cable and that repair was in progress. Our service was finally restored on September 30 at 9:45am. A total downtime of approximately 16 hours.

Needless to say, our customers were not happy. I did my best to be transparent and update our subscribers on the progress being made to restore service. In the end, we somehow didn't lose a single customer; although two did threaten to cancel.

When we first launched, adding a second upstream fiber provider was out of the question. It would have made it impossible to turn a profit. By the time these incidents occurred we were turning a small profit and I decided it would be worth the risk to sign a contract for a second provider. On October 3, 2016, I signed a contract with Level 3 for a second 10Gbps uplink. It was a huge risk, but I'm pretty happy that I made the decision back then to do so; the build got delayed and we are expected to receive delivery of the second uplink towards the end of April, 2017.

Fiber!

NEPA Fiber is finally coming to the point where running physical fiber in the ground is not far off. Our revenue is strong and the community has taken notice to our superior service.

We've signed contracts with many of the high-rise buildings in Wilkes-Barre to bring fiber to their tenants. This is a turning point both for NEPA Fiber and for business in the area. Dozens of companies have contacted us to bring fiber to them and many of them are actually moving their office space to Wilkes-Barre City just to obtain our service.

Our biggest obstacles in the near future will be getting approval from the city to run conduit/fiber in the streets and capital. We have the credit and capital necessary to perform construction of our first mile; the question is where do we go from there? Investment would be nice, but I have had zero luck with that to-date. The other option is to grow slower than I would like, but that would provide our competitors with a chance to catch up to us.

Datacenter

We also recently acquired some amazing space in "The Bank" for our datacenter. There's quite a bit of work left before we're ready to move in, but I'm excited to see where that takes us.

Where We Stand

Today, we service approximately 50 customers in or around Wilkes-Barre. By mid-2017, many of our in-flight contracts will begin to kick in and we should double or triple that number. 2017 is definitely the year that we're going to change the game. From there, the sky is the limit.

My next goal is to open another PoP (Point of Presence) in the city of Scranton. Scranton has a much larger concentration of businesses than Wilkes-Barre, but we would also be facing off against Comcast.

What?

Today NEPA Fiber offers wireless and fiber internet services to business and residential customers in Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, and Edwardsville.