The first phase of the building your community ISP will be to launch a pilot network. The pilot network will only be made availible to a few select customers, ideally consisting of a group of customers that will be representative of the various types of users your ISP will provide service to when the network is sufficently expanded to serve most (if not all) residents of St Regis.
1.) Build excitement and wider demand around the service through exclusivity.
2.) Connect as wide a range of types of customers as possible to assess what the profile of customers we will be serving, what they use their internet for, how closely the average customer’s usage aligns with the national average, and identify what key needs and expectations customers have so that we can focus our attentions on meeting those requirements.
3.) Identify any unforeseen technical or logistical issues prior to opening the service up to the community as a whole. This ensures any small issues effecting a few customers don’t end up becoming big problems that effect a large number of customers.
4.) Get enough customers online as quickly as possible that we are generating enough revenue to cover operational costs and starting produce a return on investment.
5.) Giving local trainee’s gradual exposure to installations and customer support without being overwhelming so that everyone involved is confident in their ability to handle the regular day-to-day operations.
6.) Building a solid line of communication between our respective organizations, establishing formal processes that define points of contacts. Build familiarity with who / what / where to go for infromation / resources needed to complete common tasks and devliver best-in-class customer support.
We’ve spent a considerable amount of time planning out how to best go about this first phase of the network build out. As with every highly technical and complex project there are always unforeseen technical and/or logistical issues that come up requiring special attention to resolve to ensure network stability and customer capacity. This is particulalry the case when using a extremely new service and technology as the Starlink Business service (Starlink itself being barely out of their own pilot phase), this will involve critical evaluation to assess it’s performance, stability, the number of customers one station can comfortably support without experiencing the service being slow or unavailible.
To help accomplish these goals I outlined a short list of responsibilities that our respective organizations will need to focus on to deliver the best possible service:
Pacific NW Rural Broadband Alliance:
As we want to get customers online as quickly as possible we’ll want to open up a pre-orders program with a similar pricing structure we use for our Missoula network.
While these customers will be similar to “beta testers” in some respects, the will also be among the first members of the community to have access to a modern broadband service from a local ISP, which inherently has certain qualities that large ISP’s can’t/don’t provide. Ciief among them is local support from members of the community, rather than the nameless/faceless or foreign organizations that are a source of stress and anxiety for customers. Almost / more importantly to many community members it means keeping more of their money in the local economy rather than their monthly service fee flowing out into the ether.