Hacker News Reader

> [Wireless] Speeds are competitive with cable (for now).

Latency, or just bandwidth?

I know of a few WISPs that have real network engineers behind their systems and have built reliable networks. One of them has several thousand users and multi-gigabit services.

People are jumping every day from cable to them for both speed and reliability.

Most WISPs are started by the local computer repair shop by someone who things that configuring a Linksys router is network engineering. They are plagued with reliability issues mostly of their own creation. I'm not knocking the people, they are filling a need and doing it 'good enough'.

If you build it right, they will come.

My backup WISP link is pretty terrible, and does up to 10 Mbps, barely 5 Mbps most of the time, even thought there is clear line of sight to the base station antenna, and using Ubiquiti gear, probably because the people are either inexperienced or overselling. 4G gets me 300 Mbps (now up to 300 GB for $9/mo, or unlimited data for $25) in a village of 904 people. (though I use two different antennas and connect to two base stations to obtain maximum speed from LTE with carrier and link aggregation.

Both. Our latency is better than cable in most cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com