[gregsadetsky]

How expensive would it be to start a number of small independent Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs)?

I'm thinking of a decentralized "movement" of geeks organizing what's required to get neighborhoods and villages online: an omnidirectional antenna high enough that Line of Sight can be provided to most residents, a high bandwidth fiber optics connection at the center, and subscriber antennas at the residences.

I've tried to find more information on Motorola Canopy technology in the past days -- look at this example deployment in Nova Scotia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_for_Rural_Nova_Scotia...

From what I'm gathering, Canopy can be deployed over unlicensed frequencies (2.4 and 5 Ghz), allows for hundreds of subscribers connecting to a single Access Point, can provide up bandwidth in the 5-10 Mbps range, etc.

Are there particular advantages to Canopy over 802.11x? Could it become viable, with infrastructure costs spread over some years, to run a small local WISP? I'm thinking of a "Real Internet" designation/"certification" that could be given out to any ISP that follows a basic code of conduct: offers at least one unlimited transfer connection plan and does not throttle traffic.

Is starting an ISP, regardless of the physical layer, overly regulated by CRTC? The Wikipedia page says "The CRTC does not regulate rates, quality of service issues, or business practices for Internet service providers" -- is that in effect true?

How can anyone manage with 25 GB per month? Are Netflix or the NFB going to do something about this? If not, can "we"?

[cookiecaper]

Wireless sucks if the carriers around here are any indication. My brother-in-law uses one and his connection has been throttled twice already for using too much bandwidth during peak hours -- and his usage is relatively small. The normal download rates are slow, a little less than normal DSL speeds (150k-200k) and the upload rates slower. You have to put up an antenna. They firewall you at their place and you have to call to get ports opened.

Really there's no competition to cable. Comcast is the only decent provider around here, it's much faster than DSL. Sucks.

[a_m0d]

Could be quite expensive. Where I live (40kms from Perth, WA, in a semi-rural area) we use this Motorola wireless technology, and the prices are astronomical - $80 for 3GB on peak and 5GB off peak. When we first signed up, we also had major stability issues (connection constantly dropping out, connection hijacked by a hacker for a few months, etc.), although things are looking better now.

[gregsadetsky]

Thanks a lot -- do you know if you're using a 900Mhz, 2.4 or 5Ghz subscriber unit?

Also, what's the distance from the ISP to you?

[a_m0d]

No idea. This is a really bad ISP who seem to get nothing but complaints - they assume that all their users are really dumb, so their technical FAQ (http://oceanbroadband.net/info/faq.html) states only that they use a proprietary system from Motorola Canopy Wireless. As for the distance from the exchange, I think we are about 10kms away, but once again I'm not entirely sure.

[Swannie]

"How can anyone manage with 25 GB per month?"

Very, very happily thanks. I used to "manage" quite happily on 1.5GB/month (Wireless in Australia).

Now I'm in the UK, I'm doing about 25 (thanks to BBC's streaming, which I could cut out a lot of I was PVRing more). It would only become a pain when I want to download something like a VM image.

[gregsadetsky]

I didn't mean that to be a snark! :-)

It was simply a(n emotional?) reaction (has been said many times, etc.) to the reality of bandwidth being reduced in Canada over the past... 15 years.

I used to have the-nicest-DSL-in-high-school, provided by Bell, in the late 90's -- 74$/month for 2 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, unlimited traffic.

Today, their "Fibe" offering (it sounds like "Fiber" as in FTTH! but it isn't! %^&^%$#!!) is 55$/month for 25 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up.

The speed is definitely better -- but the 100 GB transfer limit means that your effective average monthly speed is 38 kB/sec (100 Gb / seconds in 30 days...)

Why doesn't signing up for 5 Mbps mean that you get a full constant 5 Mbps, and that you can use up to the full 1.6 TB of transfer per month (5 Mbps * 30 days...)?

Isn't the reason because customers are sold oversubscribed connections?

[Swannie]

Yep, overselling for the lose I'm afraid.