I'm done drawing napkins

I don’t really post things online. Fifteen years of running a licensed carrier in Australia will do that to you: you’re too busy keeping the lights on to write about keeping the lights on.

But there’s one conversation I’ve had more times than I can count, and I’m tired of having it on a napkin.

It goes like this. Someone (a smart IT person, an MSP owner, a bloke who’s been working for a big telco and reckons he could do it better) sits down with me over a coffee or a beer and says, “I’m thinking of starting an RSP. How hard can it be?”

And I grab the nearest napkin and start drawing.

A box for the customer. A line to NBN. A cloud for the internet. Then the arrows start: transit, peering, backhaul, the BNG, billing, provisioning, the TIO, the TCP Code, the 2am phone call when a customer’s modem won’t talk to anything. By the time I’m done, the napkin’s covered in ink, they’re a bit pale, and I’ve given away the same hour I’ve given away a hundred times before.

So I’m done drawing napkins. I’m going to write it down properly, once, for anyone who wants it.

Who I am, and why you should listen

Encoo started in 2012, over a beer with Jason Li at The Sherlock Holmes on Collins Street. Our first product was calling cards. Yes, really. They were still a thing back then.

From calling cards we moved into VoIP. Then customers kept asking us the same question: “Who’s good for internet?” Eventually the answer was us. We started by reselling AAPT, and it worked, until data overtook voice and the cost of carrying traffic between capital cities started killing our multi-site deals.

So we built our own POP in Melbourne. We sized it for three years of growth and filled it in three months. That one taught me more than anything else in this business: you don’t know your real demand until you own the capacity.

We got help designing a network that could actually scale, then built Sydney, then Brisbane, and kept going. Somewhere along the way we became a licensed carrier.

Fifteen years on, we run BGP transit, IX peering, NBN backhaul and BNG infrastructure with POPs around the country. I’ve seen RSPs start, grow, get bought, and fall over. I’ve made most of the mistakes myself. Some of them twice.

What this series is

A plain-English, no-fluff guide to starting a retail service provider in Australia. Not a sales pitch. Not a consultant’s framework with a price tag at the end. Just what actually matters, in the order it matters, from someone who’s done it.

It’ll be honest, which means sometimes the answer will be “don’t do this yet” or “pay someone else to do that bit.”

Who it’s for

• People thinking about starting an RSP and wondering if they’re mad
• MSPs and IT businesses who want to add internet and voice to what they sell
• Small RSPs who started and are now realising what they didn’t know
• Anyone who works at an RSP and wants to understand how the whole machine fits together

You don’t need to be a network engineer. Where it gets technical, I’ll explain it.

How it’s going to work

Each topic lives on a napkin. Each napkin has four corners. Each corner gets a post. When the napkin’s full, we grab a new one.

Three napkins in total: can you do this, building the machine, and switching it on and growing.

Grab a coffee. Let’s start drawing.