As a one-man WISP responsible for everything at the physical level and the logical/IP configuration of the network, monitoring systems, billing systems, customer support systems etc you are also trapped in a personal hell of never being able to go on vacation and on-call 24x7x365.
There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.
My first company was an ISP. There were 4 of us. We were around 19. No business experience. No networking experience. How hard could it be, right?
I configured my first router by calling our provider and saying we'd set things up but something was wrong, and having them echo to me what they did on their side so I could "check" our side - they charged for the setup, but this way we got it for free.
We literally lived in the office for the first year, and one of my most entertaining experiences was answering the phone at 2am on a Sunday morning and the person on the other end expressing surprise that someone answered - they'd just called out of sheer desperation and expected it to ring forever.
Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorising us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package - something the person talking to him found out call by call, while the rest of us tried to not audibly laugh, because surely nobody could be that stupid? (a "learning experience" - it was how I came to understand why support people ask all those really obvious "stupid" questions.
I can't make up my mind if all the network issues were the worst part, or if the support calls were.
This was 26 years ago, and I have just about gotten over the soul-sucking parts of it by now.
I even contemplated setting up a local ISP again... I don't know why.
> Then there was the person who spent three hours terrorizing us before it transpired he'd not connected his modem, nor turned it on, or in fact taken it out of its package
I worked at a local mom and pop ISP at around the same time, probably a few years later. Those sorts of customer calls were the best (after they were resolved of course.)
* One guy would call at 2 or 3 AM and scream into our voicemail "Internet's DOWN! FIX IT NOW!!!!!". His wife would call the next day and apologize.
* One time, someone called irate that their dialup service wasn't working. He called the number we gave him, and all he heard "was a bunch of ringing and static". After several minutes we figured out he was dialing the modem bank from a telephone and expecting to use the Internet without a computer. He did not own a computer, and was quite upset we had not told him he needed one...
* It took two or three hours one time to figure out why someone couldn't connect. Helpfully, they figured it out themselves -- they were entering "the letter zero, not the number zero".
* A guy called up one time wanting to tell us about an interstellar propulsion device he developed (which also, of course, could cure cancer if the 'magnetic field' was reversed.) I suggested he call the Jet Propulsion Labs and gave him the number.
For me, the support calls were always the worst and I was very glad when the company got big enough that I no longer had to regularly take calls (although the ones I did get were the worst of the worst.)
I couldn’t not refer the guy after I spent 15 minutes listening to his…not exactly well-thought-out, but certainly extensively-thought-out idea. Also, it was Friday afternoon and I needed a way to get off the phone. Just hanging up seemed rude.
There are certain sorts of people who are capable and comfortable with doing that and have the motivation to do so, but running a small sized ISP realistically takes 3 to 4 people with differing but complementary skill sets in order for everyone to not burn out. It takes a fair bit of revenue just to handle what would be the reasonable payroll cost for that plus operating costs plus overhead.