he already said he could get someone to provide to him...for $500k. Why would it be unwise to build this if "he's not in the business?" isn't that literally what the above site is for?
when you build out physical infrastructure you are guaranteed to have real world
physical problems, on top of deep infra tech maintenance issues that you can’t just let slide.
nothing is easy at this level.
$500k is likely cheap (but would have to see details) the main problem is that you are spending it all at once instead of capitalizing it over 20 years like the ISP is.
over the same period of time it’s going to cost the same. but in all the intervening years fixing problems is going to take longer, things will be less reliable, and you have to invest in things that are not a core competency.
again, not enough details are presented so it’s hard to say, but in general DIY is a bad way to go here.
meh, i disagree. If volunteers can build out networks like these which work pretty well, then I gather paid IT folks can as well. Since it has pretty low cost to start with, it could be used as a backup system until reliability issues have been worked out, and then used as primary with a fallback to the existing functional but painfully slow service they have now. Good monitoring could go a long way to making it viable. The extra money saved could then be used to pay for technology that does contribute to the companies core competency.
like you said, without details, i think the current systems admin could make this decision better than either of us arm chairing quarterbacking it. I certainly think it's viable though, when compared to operating under the poor dsl solution they currently have.
