Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a telco?
Having deployed extensive optical networks both aerially and underground throughout Iowa, my recommendation would be to locate a community that would value your contribution as a starting point.  I would then deploy physical plant for specific customers overbuilding the fiber optics (e.g. if the customer wants 12 fibers, deploy 48 selling 12 and keeping 36 for your own future use).<p>In my experience VERY few people in the optical networking space understand how to engineer a municipal fiber optic network - they invest thousands of dollars per customer when it can be done with best practices for well under $1k per customer (let me just say that 802.1w RSTP is your friend).  You need to combine all the different ISO networking layers into a SINGLE business model (ie. physical plant and Ethernet&#x2F;VLAN circuits all by the SAME engineer not by different departments, otherwise things get unnecessarily over-engineered).<p>Even more important than the technical engineering is the financial engineering. 
 Once you understand you will never produce more capital from selling customers than it will cost to provision those customers, you need to consider more advanced financial engineering models - the one that worked great for the cellular industry and several optical networks is commercial paper.  Find a lawyer that REALLY understands commercial paper - then every contract signed by a customer actually IS cash and does not need to be converted to cash.  It&#x27;s one of the only ways I know of releasing capital invested into physical plant.<p>Good luck!