Rural Internet Service

[Erni]

Grant, I think Nokias Metro Hopper is faster, but not sure if the tech is applicable to rural or if it ever took off.

[Grant H.]

Why not just use more radios until the tech gets cheaper?

They do, but you start to run into issues of frequency allocation, synchronization, and the like. The tech isn't even that expensive, they are almost all chipset based radios with custom firmware and an external power amplifier and antenna connector. All the microwave I am installing right now is less than $200 per subscriber, and just over $600 for the AP.

All of these WISPs are in ISM bands (stands for Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) which means they are license free as long as they follow certain rules. That's great, except that EVERYONE has something in the ISM band (every single WiFi AP, home or otherwise, is in the ISM band), so finding clean spectrum that you can use is hard. Once you find some, if you have more than 1 radio on a single tower, or more than 1 tower in a general area (if they can see each other) you have to synchronize them. This is done with GPS 1PPS signals, and there are only 2 vendors of WISP type radio gear that have successfully implemented GPS sync. Everyone else has struggled and is still trying.

You also run into tower space rental costs. Most of these radios use a 90° sector antenna, and they run 4 sectors. These sectors are at minimum 2-3' tall, and probably 10-20" wide, depending on make and model. Once you mount 4 of them on a tower at your rented RAD height, (generally) there isn't enough room for at the same elevation. This means additional rental agreements on the tower, which (depending on the company that owns the tower) runs $1000-2000/month (sometimes more depending on location, tower loading, demand for tower space, etc). Now, just to offset your cost of additional tower space, you have to have a whole bunch more customers. Even worse, some of the big tower rental companies want $1000+/month per antenna on their tower, which makes them a non-starter for most WISPs, hence why a lot of WISP towers are silo's, small inexpensive towers that can't handle a whole lot of weight, or even large barns and such.

Bottom line: Yes, more AP's allows for more traffic and better service to all customers. But the additional cost, effort, and equipment often makes it not worth it from a financial standpoint for the WISP company.

Grant, I think Nokias Metro Hopper is faster, but not sure if the tech is applicable to rural or if it ever took off.

You are correct, it could be faster, but there are a lot of caveats with that kind of gear, some of which you pointed out. Rural is hard, it means "long" distances.
1. They have only proven, that I have seen, ~8Mbps throughput. They are pretty sure they can get 3Gbps with OFDM modulation being implemented, but as of the last thing I saw on it, that wasn't done yet.
2. These ridiculous high frequency radios (24GHz, 58GHz - Nokia, 60GHz) and optical data systems are great for very short links. In the 58GHz band, you get about 1km, assuming no rain, fog, or weird atmospheric shenanigans. 24GHz is better, but the best I have seen there is 1Gbps from UBNT, and they are having a hard time with links much over ~3 miles when it's dry. If it rains a lot? They say maybe 1-1.5 miles. These data systems were really designed for building to building data transmission, not rural backhaul links for WISPs.

The licensed 11GHz band offers some great solutions for Point to point shots, but the idea of PTMP in 11GHz is less than ideal because of the licensing restrictions. So, the PTMP gear ends up in 2.4GHz, and 5.8GHz ISM bands. Some goes in 900MHz, but that is harder to get good enough SNR levels with, that most don't bother. The 3.65GHz band gets used where it's legal (sometimes when it's not, it's actually not legal for WISP use in CO). The products in these bands are what we get to use, and they are the limiting factor currently. The radios are technically capable of 200Mpbs over the air, but it all comes back to how crowded the AP's are, and how much service they really have.