[waiseristy]

Are WISPs really a viable broadband option? The pricing vs data caps that you get are pretty ridiculous, especially for rural customers

And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines

[jentist_retol]

FCC official broadband number is 25Mbs per household. I, personally, think a good number is whatever is enough to sustain productivity, entertainment, and education - so about 5 down/2 up a person (obviously, more is better).

In a household with 5 people, that is 25/10, which does fit into the FCC's definition.

WISPs are popping up left and right that can do 1000/1000 per access point, which can be shared with all customers within about a 500ft radius. That's definitely doable with the above definiton of broadband. Basically, it's one wifi-based access point that has a uplink, and each household has an externally mounted wifi antenna that then redistributes to a conventional home router.

On the other hand, I personally have a WISP in a dense urban area. I pay $45~/mo for guaranteed 100/100 - usually, my sustained speeds are closer to 200/200, or 300/300. It's an antenna on our building that is the backhaul for about 50 households.

WISPs are viable in rural areas - they bring broadband to those who can't get it.

WISPs are viable in urban areas - regions where installing new copper or fiber would be prohibitively expensive, they allow upstarts to challenge the duopoly.

Just about the only awkward middle ground where the economics get a little tough is in spread suburban areas.

[hedora]

I’d argue 2 up isn’t sufficient for work from home. 6 up is hit or miss for video conferencing. It’s also super painful for uploading builds, etc.

[jentist_retol]

>2 up isn’t sufficient for work from home

maybe! I video conferenced on 1.5up for a week and I did have to turn down send quality, but other than that, it was fine.

I think the bigger issue is that if you can only get 1.5 in 2020, then that means that the physical layer between you and the internet is tenuous. Like, DSL far away from the DSLAM and thus packet loss and line noise.

[tribaal]

I worked from home for years on a 2mps symmetric link from a wireless ISP in Tanzania, video conferencing worked well enough (Google Hangouts or whatever it was called 5 years ago).

For the heavy uploads I usually resorted to doing the upload from a VPS instead though, when possible (build the artifacts from that VPS, so that both the build and upload are much faster).

[walrus01]

They absolutely are if implemented with the right technology and some degree of network engineeeing acumen. One wisp I know in kittitas is selling 50Mbps down x 15Mbps up with no data caps or quotas.

There are also a lot of crappy WISPs out there, so this is by no means definitive. Same as there's lots of crappy frontier copper wireline 5Mbps ADSL2+ still out there on degraded copper lines from 40 years ago.

[waiseristy]

Lol, ah Frontier. I have friends in the valley who used to work for them, great horror stories. What is the name of this kittitas WISP? I have long since moved out of the valley, but can pass this on to my family who still deal with horrendous providers.

[walrus01]

http://kiwireless.com/

[zbrozek]

WISP options in my area (SF Bay Area) are extremely weak. I've opted for AT&T LTE instead.

$99 for 15/3 mbps, or $139 if you want broadband: https://ethericnetworks.com/residential-service-plans/

$50 for 2.5/2.5 mbps, or $679 if you want broadband: https://ridgewireless.net/ridge-wireless-plans/

[vvanders]

Yup, we've got one out here in that's well run and has been increasing capacity with Covid-19.