The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik).
Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested.
A wisp operator can:
1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz.
2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO.
3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density
4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options.
5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt.
What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.
> Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik
Why this association? At least on the consumer side, I've really enjoyed using Mikrotik's stuff for my homelab. Is it just a sign of "someone not wanting to pony up for Real Networking Gear" or something similar?
I love Mikrotik but it kinda checks out. They're a high grade consumer/light commercial vendor more than utility scale commercial grade. I'd use them if I was trying to setup internet for my street or a small-medium sized office but not for my whole neighborhood. Their remote management utilities and software updates are good but not enough to keep me from having to ever get physical access to everything.
Juniper for routing. The neat trick with wisps with broken networks is to just drop a big juniper device in their core and edge, and replace 10 mikrotiks and suddenly a large tranche of angry customers just stop calling.
The big questions come at the tower. Juniper doesn't have a massive POE tower switch. The options there can be all bad. Its this huge mess. AC or DC, backup or no backup etc etc. And there are always drawbacks. I had a customer purchase a massive cambium tower switch with all the bells and whistles only for it to occasionally lock up and forward on all ports like a hub. Netonix can be good, however their failure rate is higher than I would like, and the support always tries to blame your grounding on returns. But the interface is easy to teach to junior techs, and other than some weird issues with linux partition size and their vlan implementation they just go. The ubiquiti tower switches are a lot of fun. I dont know if its still the case but for a few firmware versions they had half the config only available in a legacy interface. But once you made a change in the legacy interface, all the labels you set in the new interface are lost.
RF last mile for residentials, Ubiquiti/Cambium. They both work well in some respects and suck in others.
NEC for backhaul if you can get it. Otherwise there are some decent ubnt/cambo options also. ubnt has come a long way in 60GHz.
Ubiquiti’s hardware is limited in some respects whereby with Mikrotik you can implement anything, its just a matter of how and the performance. Ubiquiti for core, especially when deploying CGNAT, is a bad idea.
Is there something similar to Ubiquiti's "unified configuration" thing (where you can configure your whole network in a coherent way, maybe even from some gui)?
I love my Mikrotik homelab setup, but it's held together by carefully crafted per-box configs that are not easy to change all together (e.g. adding another VLAN, etc).
Maybe it's just my newbie status at this, but hopefully there's some cool piece of software that I just don't know about yet!
MikroTik is actually mostly configured via a GUI. It's pretty rare to use CLI except to automate stuff.
However, there is only a limited "Quick Settings" option, which supports most basic configurations. For anything more advanced, you do actually have to set it up yourself.
However, the problem with recommending Ubiquiti in the context of an ISP, is that once you hit a wall with it, you are done. You cannot change things that are not supported to be changed, you cannot make it do something it was not "designed" to do.
On Ubiquiti, you can ssh into the VyOS-derived OS on the EdgeRouter (if talking about EdgeOS), but anything you do there cannot be accessed from the webui anymore, and changing anything in the webui will of course destroy what you changed manually over SSH.
At that point, you have an offbrand Linux router that is hindering you, and you either go with MikroTik or upgrade to Cisco equipment. But that Ubiquiti is going on a shelf.
In general, it's quite different running an ISP and running a homelab.
With MikroTik, you can make ANYTHING and everything. And there is no paywall for additional features like some vendors.
Finally, to underline my point, it is required to learn MikroTik's RouterOS before starting an ISP, if you don't want to end up with problems.
Ubiquiti has a prosumer version of everything on an ISPs checklist, but most of it is either too expensive or under featured. Eventually you outgrow it and thats when you face a large expense to get out of it. Other than RF and hardware to support RF that is. Their tower switches are reasonably scalable, and some of their other kit, like FibrePOE is situationally ok.
Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night.
ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6.
MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table.
Theres other issues too. I could really go all day.
If one were to go from a bigger scale from a home lab to, say, wiring up all the units in my condo building to share the same internet connection somehow (or maybe a multi-AP wifi setup in a small business like a climbing gym), what would you go with equipment wise?
A website that sort of sucks is one of my business legitimacy tests.
But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.
I'm somewhat skeptical about the advice given out on this site, while it looks ok on first glance, can I really trust their "professional advice" if their corporate parent site [0] is serving up, as of this writing, an expired SSL cert? What other things might they be missing?
I had a client who had quite a decent network, but was always having issues. Upon investigating and subsequently asking him how he designed his last mile, he pointed us at the facebook wisp operators group. He was servicing high value customers with large dedicated speeds, based on a network design that kind of works for servicing trailer parks in rural USA. Mostly because the loudest voices in the space come from the jankiest moron wisp operators.
The issue is that a lot of the advice is bad, the good advice costs money and is indistinguishable for the lay person from the bad advice, and its very easy to access terrible advice. This website isn't terrible, but it would serve to pay for the best advice possible before spending even more money on the wrong hardware in the wrong area.
Yeah thats the issue. Well that and that most WISP operators have bought in to this idea that a non technical person can engineer a network for 1000 customers without support, so its not just that they dont know who to get advice from, they have been told they should be able to figure it out without help.
Can you trust the advice of any random website? Can you trust the advice of someone here on Hacker News? Can I trust your commentary about their advice?
The the answer largely depends on what you're trusting the advice for. Is it medical advice? Trust none of it. Is it the advice going to cost you a lot of money? I'd ask an expert.
The site here is purely informational-use-at-your-own-risk. No different than anything else on the internet. It'll get you started on your research so you can have some basis upon which to ask/talk to each other. Hey, even links to a community discord where you can talk to like minded individuals and maybe get some more clarity.
Eh in general sure. But if you're giving networking advice you definitely want to either opinionatedly not use TLS ('use case doesn't warrant it, so am against HTTPS all the things'), or have a valid cert.
Lots of people are mentioning starlink. But there is a hard cap to how many subscribers can be in a given zone. Which means that although it is cheap right now, there is a hard cap for supply. That's the main reason the marine and RV packages/plans cost more.
Isn't the point of starlink to service extremely remote areas? If there are too many subscribers for the system to work, it sounds like it should be dense enough to have fiber run to houses.
Capacity at the teleports is probably pretty easy to upgrade. If possible they're near internet exchanges, and if not, they've most likely got good fiber connectivity and can update the optics on both sides to get more capacity easily.
Maybe they've got some sites in the middle of nowhere, but I'd bet they worked with fiber vendors to pick places that were easy to hook up to existing fiber, because why not. I think I recall seeing someone had done some sleuthing and found that the teleports were sometimes being placed along rail right-of-ways, where there's often also fiber and maybe even power.
I have yet to see a 5G home internet solution that's actually useful. It seems to be a "budget" internet option more than a viable alternative to most other solutions.
Latency and speed are slow, and some of the providers mess with/block certain traffic (IKEv2 etc).
Here in New Zealand 4G has proved to work surprisely well for FWA (Fixed Wireless Access). I think the important thing is that the providers need to be very strict at limiting the number of customers they sell to. Here, the providers will proactively stop selling new FWA connection in a certain area the tower sector serving that area is getting close to capacity limits. They'll also check where the customer is located and ensure they can actually provide a decent service. This check is done automatically off coverage and capacity data.
Most of the major FWA providers are mobile phone carriers, so both mobile and FWA customers actually use the same tower/spectrum/etc so the general increase in demand (especially from mobile given they can't stop selling new mobile servcies) sometimes results in a good service in Year 1 degrading to poorer service in subsquent years. However the carriers can easily resolve that by adding more 4G carriers, deploying 5G, and even building new cell sites (which kills two birds with one stone -- better coverage for mobile users and more capacity for FWA users).
When FWA first came out I confess that I thought it was a silly idea until my eldery mother accepted an incentive from her provider (cheaper monthly fee) if she moved onto FWA (from ADSL previously). She's zero complaints. And sure enough it works well for a low-end user -- emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTube, etc all work just as good on FWA as it does on fibre/DSL/Cable/etc. She happens to be close enough to the tower and that tower has also been upgraded and has heaps of 4G carriers so the service is consisently good.
YMMV but when done well, 4G/5G FWA is a great option for low-end users.
I'm writing from 4G, the same that I use to work remotely as a software engineer. It's not even a dedicated 'home internet' solution, just an unlimited data plan that I use with a decent modem/antenna.
(Yes obviously latency is worse than fibre, I would probably hate it if I was still into FPS gaming etc., but in practice it's fine.)
(When I set it up it was better and cheaper than the copper options, fibre not available. Fibre or Starlink would now probably be better, but still each much more expensive, even ignoring one-time costs. I don't need it/not worth it. Idk about latency but I could certainly get more bandwidth out of one-time costs on LTE too.)
CGNAT is killer though, the random connection drops when you don't get a static IP from your cellular provider cause random connection drops whenever their CGNAT gateway burps or misbehaves.
Most people on cellphones don't notice, but it becomes oh so noticeable when your interacting with it every day.
I tried out (US) T-Mobile's small business internet, and while it wasn't useful for me, if I was a little more normal or had worked a little harder with sales to get what I needed, it would be fine. The v6 connectivity was pretty good, v4 is CGNAT, unless you sign up for a static IP, which needs an EIN business account; the sales rep can sign you up for a static IP with a SSN business account, but it will be deleted and they won't add it back.
Also, I forgot which equipment they gave me, but it had terrible buffer bloat, and did some nasty nasty arp spoofing when I placed it on my network and made everything bad, and it wouldn't let me put it on XX.2.0/24 and have a static route for XX.0.0/24 so maybe I could keep it roughly contained. Maaaaybe I could have done something with VLANs, but I was done at that point. I'm still grumpy because it took 3 months and contacting the CEO email address to get the bill settled, but they did settle it. Not exactly a risk free trial in my book.
Speed and latency was good though, as long as you didn't hit bufferbloat. I don't remember exactly, but 500M+ down, 200M+ up, < 25 ms ping; CGNAT brought the speeds down to about 100M, but most CDNs are v6 capable now, and most people aren't that bothered by CGNAT. Obviously you and I and a lot of others here have reasons to want their own v4 address, but a lot of people in a lot of places can't get one on any home internet, so. Of course, speed and latency vary a lot by your reception, but I live on a heavily forested and very hilly island; I am at a high point, but surrounded by trees so eh?
Eh, my ISP (Comcast) has extremely unreliable internet across two different homes I've lived in, to the point that I absolutely rely on having both a 5G modem and a wired one. If my 5G signal was strong enough to keep me going on a rainy day, I would absolutely ditch the wired connection and its flaky mysterious dropped packets.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a wired connection. But if my isp can't even be bothered to give me a functional connection more than 90% of the time...
I spent 20 hours diagnosing my internet in a situation that sounded like yours. The solution actually showed itself: the copper from the street pigtail had a connection end that was improperly installed. It grounded into the protective braided metal around it, and each time the isp came to diagnose, they disconnected the bad wire then measured from the street and said "no issues". I felt really triumphant when that was corrected.
I just switched from long-range wireless to Starlink basic. It's 50% cheaper and much, much more reliable. Speeds are comparable (when the long-range wifi wasn't down, which it was pretty often). Long-range wifi had a data cap with crazy overage fees, Starlink is unlimited.
The priority service wasn’t much faster 6-8 months ago but seems to be much faster from what he been reading and seeing recently, but it might’ve relative to how busy a particular area is
Man, this was exciting back in the day, but now big risk you'll get blown out by Starlink. Starlink can just put high-speed internet into everyone's backyards.
Hmm, not really. Starlink only offers 150mbit, at $150/mo, whereas the costs for starting your ISP as presented here is about $25k up front and $3k/mo to keep it running. That's ridiculous for one person, but entirely economically viable if you're literally starting your own local ISP to service a few hundred homes, driving down the one-time signup and monthly fees to something drastically lower than what Starlink charges, for speeds that are drastically higher than what Starlink offers.
But as any business venture: if you don't know whether you can get the customers, you better have the cash lying around to pay for everything yourself =D
In my area, fiber and cable aren’t available. If you’re lucky, you can get 5 mbps DSL for $70+ per month.
The only credible options are WISP, Starlink, and cellular. WISP is the same price as Starlink and is slower / less reliable. Cellular is cheaper but gets slow at peak hours.
In short, the local WISP has been losing a lot of customers to Starlink and T-Mobile Home Internet.
That's simply not true in my direct experience. I built a WISP back in the day, and although I don't have customers now, I still use the backhaul network to feed my office (typing this over that network). I have Starlink as a backup. Starlink is about as fast as my fixed wireless terrestrial link. It's often faster for download, and about 2/3 as fast for upload. Way, way faster than dialup and DSL.
I'm on the basic plan and usually see about 75mbps. It can drop to 20 or so during peak netflix hours. But that's still plenty fast enough for multiple HD video streams. What we had before was much slower and much, much less reliable.
If you can get a fast wired connection, do it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for them.
What kind of wired connection did you have previously?
The target audience for Starlink in the continental US seems to be people who's other options are traditional satellite, dial-up, or sometimes DSL (typically implying you're in a more rural area, but not always). For people in those situations, Starlink can be a good alternative.
However, if you have access to modern cable or FTTH... well, it's not a substitute.
I think this is going to depend somewhat on how congested your area is, but Starlink is my home ISP and I sometimes get faster (download) speeds at home than I do at the office where we have fiber at 200 Mbps down. It has a little more variance but is consistently quite fast. If the backend is on GCP, it amazes me how fast it will go.
Why does your office only have fibre at 200Mbps down? Last office I was involved in setting up, we didn’t need symmetrical gigabit but the cost was fairly inconsequential compared to lower speeds, so we just went with the gigabit… Really strange that service providers even bother running fibre at lower speeds for commercial accounts…
Regional pricing means it's 500-560 USD up-front to buy the receiver. Then, 50-100 USD per month for the residential plan, which includes unlimited data.
That's not too bad. However, there's no speed listed. Third party reviews state 100/10 Mbps (up/down), which is not too bad considering the same site states a UK average of 75/15.
The vast majority of the UK has pretty slow speeds.
That said, unlimited internet subscriptions over fiber can be had for as little as 20 USD per month, which is far cheaper.
Spectrum is charging me $85 a month (and constantly increasing) for internet (JUST internet) that clocks out at about 200 Mbps, so that really doesn't sound all that bad.
Until Starlink can lower prices to < $10/month, community-level ISPs will still be relevant to many locations (LatAm, etc). Starlink uplinks might even be used by the ISPs.
I lived in a village in Colombia, population about 2000, which had four competing wireless ISPs. The quality was extremely low, but so were the prices.
Considering that they're still iterating on and launching satellites, it doesn't really matter that they'll only last 5 years. It isn't like they're launching the constellation and then sitting on it waiting for the satellites to fall out of the sky.
For now they're having to launch a Falcon 9 twice a week to build up the constellation, but with Starship intended to be able to launch the equivalent of several F9 launches in one go, maintaining the constellation will become much easier.
Does King County not have a municipal fiber provider? Kitsap does, but of course, WA law makes it hard for them to do roll outs. Everybody has to pay their own way, whereas commercial providers can do a roll out and wait for customers to return ROI later.
You can cost share, if you can get your neighbors to also sign up... but there's only me and one other crazy person who will do it, because the cost is too high. Not a lot of people are interested in paying $50k to upgrade from 50-100M down to 100m or 1g symmetric. It's better, but not enough better; especially when T-mobile 5G can get you 500m+ down/ 200m+ up with no installation.
I wish this hadn't been about a WISP, because I'd have loved to read about someone's experience bringing fibre to a door in a neighborhood. I live in a community with a regional ISP that offers me gigabit fibre with minimal extra hardware (just an ONT, hooray!), and with AT&T starting to dig in our area, I wondered what it would take to have a neighborhood only competitor. Probably infeasible, and a major disadvantage over a WISP in that I'd need to dig, but if the ground is already dug up and conduits being laid...
> a major disadvantage over a WISP in that I'd need to dig, but if the ground is already dug up and conduits being laid...
My life experience has been that there's a "sane person's mental model" and then there's Municipal Bureaucrazy and nere the twain shall meet
So, yes, it's possible there is already trenching and it could even be that said conduit are owned by the taxpayer, but as far as random citizen pulling fibre through them ... I have fears. That story gets worse with the number of articles that I have read where Local Incumbent ISP bribes^Wlobbies a city councilperson to slow roll or straight-up deny any such request, making it doubly not a technology problem
I wrote that with the best being optimism. I'm 100% sure these trenches, despite them being in our easements, is the property of AT&T for their exclusive use only. I can still wish that wasn't the case, but I'm not that naive.
There are plenty of small ISPs operating in Canada. Many have been acquired by Bell / Telus / Rogers in recent years, but there are still dozens of players offering fixed wireless or fibre connections -- mostly in rural areas.
Regulatory capture and the regulator being in bed with the incumbents. Not Canada-specific even, this is a common problem in a lot of countries when it comes to telecoms.
Really? I found Canada one of the least regulated. Although there were a few weird hoops.
Out of ~10 countries I have supported WISP's in, I have never seen a country with less of a barrier to entry.
We did have a theory that our customers were rural, and that the cities might present different issues. But trying to do what they did in Australia would be add 2 zeroes to the end of every cost.
And now all telecom companies are required to interconnect, right? Or did that not happen? The government mandated that after the "Rogers outage" - so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again."
Or Ebox. In fact some of hurdles were documented on dslreports forum. Starting with wholesale access to cable ( worked OK for a while ) continuing with wholesale access to fiber ( never happens ) and ending with the end of the 'sane' rates for cable ( final nail before Ebox, Destributel and other were sold to Bell/Telus/Cogeco )
Fighting every municipality and Homeowners Association (HOA, aka Strata) along the way. Running fiber is tough here in the US, even motivated incumbents see a minimum of a 6 month delay waiting for permits in many municipalities to run fiber through existing conduit owned by said incumbent.
Beanfield runs fiber through streets and sewers, and provides networking to office buildings and condominium apartments. I don't think they serve detached houses, as the low density is not worth it.
In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH.
There are a few in SF. MonkeyBrains being a local-friendly top of mind name. Downside is the smallest vibrations, wind gusts, or rain often leads to service degradation.
And also Sonic.net crew representin', although bizarrely they are(were?) only north of Market street :-(
I also had mostly-good experiences with Google Fiber (née Webpass) coming to the condo building, although despite their name it came in via WISP on the roof. I could have thrown a rock and hit the Webpass building from my condo but ... at least it wasn't Comcast and the whole building got gigabit IPv6 service for what any one of the owners would have paid for it from Comcast. I bet our units being pre-wired for Ethernet made the situation easier, but depending on the size of the HOA I'd guess not insurmountable even if one had to pull cat6 later
There are Federal programs you can apply for that will subsidize this cost. Otherwise, you're looking at roughly a 2~ year wait after being approved for the ARIN waitlist (max allocation size of /22 i think)
* "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493
* "NLNOG: Getting Fiber To My Town [video]": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910
* "Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband–so he built his own fiber ISP": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753360
* "How To Create Your Own ISP with Jared Mauch": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJH9Emr99KI
The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik).
Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested.
A wisp operator can:
1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz.
2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO.
3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density
4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options.
5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt.
What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.
Why this association? At least on the consumer side, I've really enjoyed using Mikrotik's stuff for my homelab. Is it just a sign of "someone not wanting to pony up for Real Networking Gear" or something similar?
The big questions come at the tower. Juniper doesn't have a massive POE tower switch. The options there can be all bad. Its this huge mess. AC or DC, backup or no backup etc etc. And there are always drawbacks. I had a customer purchase a massive cambium tower switch with all the bells and whistles only for it to occasionally lock up and forward on all ports like a hub. Netonix can be good, however their failure rate is higher than I would like, and the support always tries to blame your grounding on returns. But the interface is easy to teach to junior techs, and other than some weird issues with linux partition size and their vlan implementation they just go. The ubiquiti tower switches are a lot of fun. I dont know if its still the case but for a few firmware versions they had half the config only available in a legacy interface. But once you made a change in the legacy interface, all the labels you set in the new interface are lost.
RF last mile for residentials, Ubiquiti/Cambium. They both work well in some respects and suck in others.
NEC for backhaul if you can get it. Otherwise there are some decent ubnt/cambo options also. ubnt has come a long way in 60GHz.
If you want real telco stuff look at Edge core or Nokia.
I love my Mikrotik homelab setup, but it's held together by carefully crafted per-box configs that are not easy to change all together (e.g. adding another VLAN, etc).
Maybe it's just my newbie status at this, but hopefully there's some cool piece of software that I just don't know about yet!
However, there is only a limited "Quick Settings" option, which supports most basic configurations. For anything more advanced, you do actually have to set it up yourself.
However, the problem with recommending Ubiquiti in the context of an ISP, is that once you hit a wall with it, you are done. You cannot change things that are not supported to be changed, you cannot make it do something it was not "designed" to do.
On Ubiquiti, you can ssh into the VyOS-derived OS on the EdgeRouter (if talking about EdgeOS), but anything you do there cannot be accessed from the webui anymore, and changing anything in the webui will of course destroy what you changed manually over SSH.
At that point, you have an offbrand Linux router that is hindering you, and you either go with MikroTik or upgrade to Cisco equipment. But that Ubiquiti is going on a shelf.
In general, it's quite different running an ISP and running a homelab.
With MikroTik, you can make ANYTHING and everything. And there is no paywall for additional features like some vendors.
Finally, to underline my point, it is required to learn MikroTik's RouterOS before starting an ISP, if you don't want to end up with problems.
Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night.
ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6.
MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table.
Theres other issues too. I could really go all day.
Great homelab stuff. I use it too.
I'm guessing not Cisco because the license costs?
Mostly right, but the boss hired pretty smart people fresh out of college (cheap).
They are still around and their website still sucks. Last I heard they were doing fine.
But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539165 (June 17, 2021 — 607 points, 153 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 (August 17, 2019 — 635 points, 95 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 (January 16, 2018 — 938 points, 193 comments)
[0] https://outpost.plus
The issue is that a lot of the advice is bad, the good advice costs money and is indistinguishable for the lay person from the bad advice, and its very easy to access terrible advice. This website isn't terrible, but it would serve to pay for the best advice possible before spending even more money on the wrong hardware in the wrong area.
the lay person also may not be able to identify who's advice is worth paying for
The the answer largely depends on what you're trusting the advice for. Is it medical advice? Trust none of it. Is it the advice going to cost you a lot of money? I'd ask an expert.
The site here is purely informational-use-at-your-own-risk. No different than anything else on the internet. It'll get you started on your research so you can have some basis upon which to ask/talk to each other. Hey, even links to a community discord where you can talk to like minded individuals and maybe get some more clarity.
Maybe they've got some sites in the middle of nowhere, but I'd bet they worked with fiber vendors to pick places that were easy to hook up to existing fiber, because why not. I think I recall seeing someone had done some sleuthing and found that the teleports were sometimes being placed along rail right-of-ways, where there's often also fiber and maybe even power.
"How do you collect a small fortune with an ISP?"
"Start with a large fortune"
Latency and speed are slow, and some of the providers mess with/block certain traffic (IKEv2 etc).
Most of the major FWA providers are mobile phone carriers, so both mobile and FWA customers actually use the same tower/spectrum/etc so the general increase in demand (especially from mobile given they can't stop selling new mobile servcies) sometimes results in a good service in Year 1 degrading to poorer service in subsquent years. However the carriers can easily resolve that by adding more 4G carriers, deploying 5G, and even building new cell sites (which kills two birds with one stone -- better coverage for mobile users and more capacity for FWA users).
When FWA first came out I confess that I thought it was a silly idea until my eldery mother accepted an incentive from her provider (cheaper monthly fee) if she moved onto FWA (from ADSL previously). She's zero complaints. And sure enough it works well for a low-end user -- emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTube, etc all work just as good on FWA as it does on fibre/DSL/Cable/etc. She happens to be close enough to the tower and that tower has also been upgraded and has heaps of 4G carriers so the service is consisently good.
YMMV but when done well, 4G/5G FWA is a great option for low-end users.
(Yes obviously latency is worse than fibre, I would probably hate it if I was still into FPS gaming etc., but in practice it's fine.)
(When I set it up it was better and cheaper than the copper options, fibre not available. Fibre or Starlink would now probably be better, but still each much more expensive, even ignoring one-time costs. I don't need it/not worth it. Idk about latency but I could certainly get more bandwidth out of one-time costs on LTE too.)
Most people on cellphones don't notice, but it becomes oh so noticeable when your interacting with it every day.
Also, I forgot which equipment they gave me, but it had terrible buffer bloat, and did some nasty nasty arp spoofing when I placed it on my network and made everything bad, and it wouldn't let me put it on XX.2.0/24 and have a static route for XX.0.0/24 so maybe I could keep it roughly contained. Maaaaybe I could have done something with VLANs, but I was done at that point. I'm still grumpy because it took 3 months and contacting the CEO email address to get the bill settled, but they did settle it. Not exactly a risk free trial in my book.
Speed and latency was good though, as long as you didn't hit bufferbloat. I don't remember exactly, but 500M+ down, 200M+ up, < 25 ms ping; CGNAT brought the speeds down to about 100M, but most CDNs are v6 capable now, and most people aren't that bothered by CGNAT. Obviously you and I and a lot of others here have reasons to want their own v4 address, but a lot of people in a lot of places can't get one on any home internet, so. Of course, speed and latency vary a lot by your reception, but I live on a heavily forested and very hilly island; I am at a high point, but surrounded by trees so eh?
What service have you tried that didn't work well for you?
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a wired connection. But if my isp can't even be bothered to give me a functional connection more than 90% of the time...
Besides that, not everyone is willing to pay for a Starlink priority plan.
The priority service wasn’t much faster 6-8 months ago but seems to be much faster from what he been reading and seeing recently, but it might’ve relative to how busy a particular area is
But as any business venture: if you don't know whether you can get the customers, you better have the cash lying around to pay for everything yourself =D
The only credible options are WISP, Starlink, and cellular. WISP is the same price as Starlink and is slower / less reliable. Cellular is cheaper but gets slow at peak hours.
In short, the local WISP has been losing a lot of customers to Starlink and T-Mobile Home Internet.
Starlink is a replacement for dial-up, satellite, and in some cases legacy DSL- pretty much nothing else.
You can push gigabit[1] ptp over the air these days for pretty cheap. Starlink seems to top out around 200Mbps in the best case.
[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/collections/uisp-wireless-airfibe...
https://ca.store.ui.com/ca/en/pro/category/all-60ghz-wireles...
If you can get a fast wired connection, do it. Starlink is for people who can't, and it's far and away the best option for them.
The target audience for Starlink in the continental US seems to be people who's other options are traditional satellite, dial-up, or sometimes DSL (typically implying you're in a more rural area, but not always). For people in those situations, Starlink can be a good alternative.
However, if you have access to modern cable or FTTH... well, it's not a substitute.
That's not too bad. However, there's no speed listed. Third party reviews state 100/10 Mbps (up/down), which is not too bad considering the same site states a UK average of 75/15.
The vast majority of the UK has pretty slow speeds.
That said, unlimited internet subscriptions over fiber can be had for as little as 20 USD per month, which is far cheaper.
I lived in a village in Colombia, population about 2000, which had four competing wireless ISPs. The quality was extremely low, but so were the prices.
For now they're having to launch a Falcon 9 twice a week to build up the constellation, but with Starship intended to be able to launch the equivalent of several F9 launches in one go, maintaining the constellation will become much easier.
You can cost share, if you can get your neighbors to also sign up... but there's only me and one other crazy person who will do it, because the cost is too high. Not a lot of people are interested in paying $50k to upgrade from 50-100M down to 100m or 1g symmetric. It's better, but not enough better; especially when T-mobile 5G can get you 500m+ down/ 200m+ up with no installation.
My life experience has been that there's a "sane person's mental model" and then there's Municipal Bureaucrazy and nere the twain shall meet
So, yes, it's possible there is already trenching and it could even be that said conduit are owned by the taxpayer, but as far as random citizen pulling fibre through them ... I have fears. That story gets worse with the number of articles that I have read where Local Incumbent ISP bribes^Wlobbies a city councilperson to slow roll or straight-up deny any such request, making it doubly not a technology problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_service_provi...
https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/what-we-do/projectss...
Out of ~10 countries I have supported WISP's in, I have never seen a country with less of a barrier to entry.
We did have a theory that our customers were rural, and that the cities might present different issues. But trying to do what they did in Australia would be add 2 zeroes to the end of every cost.
No. That's not the case at all.
> so that other providers can act as "backups", so "that never happens again."
Also, no.
Also what do you mean by interconnect? BGP IP peering is a thing for a while. Big folks peer with big folks.
Are you aware of this?
* https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/11/06/bell-and-telus-must-offer...
Or you can do what Beanfield did and build out your own fibre infrastructure to customers.
In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH.
It of course never happened.
I also had mostly-good experiences with Google Fiber (née Webpass) coming to the condo building, although despite their name it came in via WISP on the roof. I could have thrown a rock and hit the Webpass building from my condo but ... at least it wasn't Comcast and the whole building got gigabit IPv6 service for what any one of the owners would have paid for it from Comcast. I bet our units being pre-wired for Ethernet made the situation easier, but depending on the size of the HOA I'd guess not insurmountable even if one had to pull cat6 later