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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Ooh, I really want two of these. I'm stuck on an island with poor last mile service providers. But, I have line of sight to a number of spots with good quality fiber.

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If you've got line of sight then current (cheap) tech should do just fine. Sure not 10x gigabit but you can def get some decent internet...

Do you have any recommendations for current products for line of sight?

for what dollar figure, distance and speeds? anywhere from $300/link (a pair of ubiquiti powerbeam AC 5 GHz) up to $20,000 for 1 to 10GbE licensed.

I don't have any first hand experience, but I know you can do long range (couple kilometers), reliable (for consumer level) decent speed links for dirt cheap (<150USD for each side with weather proofing etc) based on the WUGs in my home country (ZA).

Detour paragraph - background - Internet has historically been pretty sht in South Africa so a enthusiast spider network of point to point links sprung up much like the ham radio movement. Government decided to OK it as long as its not commercial & doesn't deliver internet services.

Anyway...the WUG websites (JAWUG, PTAWUG, CPTWUG - being Johannesburg/Pretoria/CapeTown) have lots of beginner style info on it (will trees and leaves in block it etc)...plus info on cheap kits...plus there are loads of people there that know this stuff in wild detail (as I said - 100% community driven so even the central high-sites are community run).

I know some people who have successfully used Ubiquiti's airFiber for point-to-point links. I think those run on the order of $5 grand for a complete installation (two radios, mounts, etc) of a faster-than-gigabit link.

We run some between offices across the street from each other. We were lucky as we didn't understand the minimum distance was probably more important than the maximum distance for this type of setup! They have run flawlessly at about 800Mbps for the last year.

I love Ubiquiti's products. They're easy to setup and cheap too. From experience, they're also quite reliable.

The company's community forums can be quite helpful too.

What kind of link are you after? (Speed, distance, how far over water, are both sites powered, etc)

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