 What Would It Take To Startup A Telecom Company?
dkersten: Telecom Company is too vague a term. For example, I work for a company which sells value added SMS services to mobile operators (eg, our anti spam/fraud product is popular right now). This is a telecom company, as are our customers. What you didn't specify is do you want to start a carrier/operator/ISP or a service company or a hardware manufacturer or...What it takes really depends on what it is you want to do. In general, though, I think it takes skill/expertise most of all (not that you need it to begin with, but you will need to learn and its tough to pick up because theres so many densely packed RFCs, standards and regulations. For what I do, I'd say I sifted through 10K pages of GSM specs and RFCs..), money is no more important than any other startup, though obviously if you do something that requires resources (hardware?) then you need to be able to pay for this. Selling to operators also seems to be the same as selling expensive enterprise software: looong lead times, development and work to be done before the deal is closed, money after everythings installed and working etc (so you need to have enough funds on hand to be able to get this far). Finally, its tough to break into the telco industry because most companies dont like to take risks and a startup with an unproven product poses risk over the old big well established company.