Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a telco? (re: Rogers outage)
by cl42 on Hacker News.
I’m based in Vancouver, work remotely for a global company, and the outage yesterday was a huge pain in the butt for myself and many Canadians I work with… I am appalled that 911 services weren’t even working in some cases. The telcos here are terrible. I’d love to hear how HN users would think of bootstrapping a telco? We’ve had a few startups try and disrupt things in Canada (e.g., Wind Mobile). They were funded by large global investment groups and eventually simply got acquired by the incumbent telcos. The other approach I’ve seen is piggybacking on existing telco infrastructure. This is required by law since the Canadian government subsidizes telco infrastructure… It’s not uncommon for the telcos to renege on their contractual/legal obligations. Plus, this doesn’t create any redundant networks. So: how else can one launch a telco? What creative solutions have folks seen? I’m thinking: VOIP-only service that has direct access to the Internet backbone in Toronto, Vancouver, etc. so you can at least have completely separate service in major cities… Or crowdfunding 5G towers (though I imagine spectrum licensing is an issue here). Would love to hear what other HN readers think.