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Philly Wisper

phillywisper.net

137 pointsheydenberk94 comments

I love to see this, but it's a hard sell. Philly is one of the lucky cities with reasonable competition already, one of which is Verizon's Fios - decently built out through the city. A lot of new construction homes have both Comcast* and Fios pre-wired into the home, so installation is trivial and competition is, delightfully, fierce.

25M wireless connections at $50 are a hard sell against 1G fiber at $80.

I don't mean to be a debbie-downer about this, because I think promoting connectivity is a huge boon to society.

* Fun fact, the new Comcast building looks like a middle finger facing west - literally flipping off the rest of the country. Seems appropriate.

from some angles (directly north or south) it looks like a vape rig to me.

Obviously better private, if possible, but a couple of counter points.

First, Comcast/Verizon is a duopoly with two of the poorest customer satisfaction companies in the country. Ie last place [0]. They do what they want, they charge for things like rural broadband and pocket the fee but don't provide it, they (alleged?) sell your data and browsing habits, they mess with your traffic [2] ... a miserable, expensive experience all around. BTW I pay Vrz $80/mo for 150mbps only, no bundle, and it was major grief to get this.

Second, Municipal broadband is blocked here [1]. Comcast HQ in Philly is a big force.

0. http://fortune.com/2017/05/25/cable-tv-comcast-verizon/

1. https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7izns8/are_you_...

Call them up and ask for their online offer of 3-year $79.99 for their "1G" (I always forget that theirs is actually a bit below).

This is live today: https://postimg.cc/G446YpBQ

I see it when browsing to their Fios site: https://www.verizon.com/home/fios-fastest-internet/

You may have to cancel and re-order - I did. I'm not sure whether you consider it a hassle or not. For me, it meant hanging out at home for a two hour window (always grab the morning ones so someone else's delay doesn't become your late appointment). This is easy, as I work from home, but it's also not hard to find time on a weekend (for me).

I highly recommend calling up and asking them. You can set your disconnection day and your appointment on the same day. You mail back your old equipment in a box they send you.

25M wireless connections at $50 are a hard sell against 1G fiber at $80.

I don't understand what you mean. $50 is cheaper than $80. It's not hard to sell someone on cheaper. That extra $360/yr is nothing to scoff at, at least for me. Next, you gotta ask yourself if the extra speed and cost of $30/mo is worth Comcast & Verizon's terrible customer service [0]. Then, you gotta think about if you even need more than 25M (my household does not) and if you're paying extra for something you're not using.

0 - I've had Comcast show up unannounced and started drilling holes in my house front. Comcast customer service couldn't confirm this crew worked with the company and suggested I call the cops on them...

Ignore the 1G price. In Philadelphia, Fios costs $40 the first year and $55 after for 100M up/down. So for three years and change you can get four times the speed for the same total cost.

I would guess for the vast majority of the population, 25Mbps is perfectly acceptable. That's what we have. Surfing the web and watching Netflix doesn't take that much bandwidth. Start streaming multiple Netflix shows and maybe it starts to get dicey, but we've never had a problem.

yeah, couple years ago I switched from 100mb FTTC to a somewhat cheaper adsl2+ because latency and packet loss is more important to me, I guess lot other gamers feel the same way.

>A lot of new construction homes

Most houses here in Philly (especially in Kensington) are not new construction, so FIOS isn't really an option yet.

I for one welcome a new entrant into this arena.

New construction doesn't really matter because they use poles for their lines in Philadelphia and they run an extension to your building for free.

Yep. My building "qualified" and a technician basically threw a line out the back to a pole. Apparently they only install in the rear of buildings, so if they can't get access back there, that can be an issue.

Funny, my brother lives in Kensington and he had fios installed literally this morning. I asked and he said they ran it to the front of the building.

25 Mbps is the minimum speed we provide. Our customers typically see a good bit more. And for context, a Netflix HD stream only requires 5 Mbps.

Also, our $50 a month is actually $50. There are no extra service, rental fees, franchise frees, or taxes. It's a single flat rate price.

We also do require or even offer annual contracts.

In other words, we make getting Internet service easy and hassle free.

Finally, we implement Network Neutrality and will never sell or share our customer's personal data or browsing history (short of a valid warrant).

But Fios in Philly is $40 a month (and then $55) for 100Mbps with no installation fees or contracts, so it will take your customers more than three years to break even for probably worse speeds. The net neutrality promise is nice, but do you have other selling points?

There is more to the Internet marketplace than just price and speed. Customer service and privacy are two things our customers value highly.

I believe you can provide something important to some people there, but I don't think you're selling it well. You say that those are your big differentiators, but they're basically buried on your site.

Landing on the page, the first things I see are "FAST" with numbers that are several times slower than what people expect and "$" with prices that are higher. And then I have to scroll down and find the fourth bullet point below the fold beneath the not very interesting "just internet" and the damning "we can't give you service without direct line of sight".

The general public looking for an ISP is price sensitive enough that they will know the price landscape of your competitors, so they will know that fios costs less for higher speeds. Your market is going to be exclusively people who don't want to give Verizon or Comcast their business.

To me personally, highlighting the things that you don't excel at (speed/price) instead of the ones you do (not being comcast/verizon) make it look like you don't know your competition and you aren't pitching directly to your primary market, which isn't a great signal.

We also have no way of knowing that Verizon and Comcast aren't your backend, which means that, for all anyone knows, giving you money is giving them money.

Also, a side technical note on the site layout: your text falls on top of your graphics. ( https://imgur.com/VcVaZsw )

I, for one, would happily pay the price to know my money isn't subsidizing lobbying to legalize the cable-fication of the internet.

I would too!

But we have no way of knowing that Verizon and Comcast aren't their backend. For all anyone knows, giving them money _is_ giving Verizon/Comcast money.

The founder is here if you wanna ask him.

Either way, money talks - as a consumer, if I use Philly Wisper, I am explicitly saying "Net Neutrality is important enough to me to seek out businesses that promote it."

We use two back end carriers and about to add a 3rd. We do not use Comcast or Verizon. Of the ones we do use, you may have heard of one of the carriers, probably not the other. The 3rd, very unlikely. And no, I'm not going to name them.

I'm in Philly and the cheapest FiOS I could get is $115/mo after the new member deal expired

Unless you're talking about gigabit plus television, the reps were scamming you. That's what they do, and it's one of the reasons people hate giving them money. You should cancel your account and then open a new one online in a partner's name so that they stop playing games with you. Always do it online. Prices through phone reps are always worse these days because of what the different modality says about the customer.

    > ... never sell or share our customer's personal data or browsing history (short of a valid warrant).

OK, that's cool, but what about those scary-looking DMCA letters that people get from ISP's? What happens when you get a list of "violator" ip-addresses from a lawyer?

Do you provide service to apartments or only to homeowners?

Yes, we provide service to apartment buildings. However, we need to work with the building mgmt if it has more than a handful of units.

Unfortunately, while Fios may be widespread it is not universal by any means. I live in a Center City neighborhood which definitely has Fios in the area, but not in my building. Why not? No idea, but I've been here for ~4 years and there's no sign that my building will ever have Fios.

I'm currently paying Comcast $108.99/mo, including a $13 modem rental fee, for "Blast internet" with "Download speeds up to 250 Mbps" but uploads of only ~11Mbps. When I first got Xfinity I tried to install my own modem so I wouldn't need to rent, but after hours upon hours with support trying to get my brand new modem to work, I gave up in frustration and just rented one.

I upload photos, video etc. often enough that I would accept a hit to my download speed in order to increase my upload speed.

I'm trying to switch away from Comcast to Philly Wisper, after suffering through Xfinity for years. Unfortunately I'm having trouble reaching my landlord to get access to the roof so that Philly Wisper can check for line-of-sight, but hopefully that gets cleared up soon.

Same boat. There is Fios in the building adjacent to me. I see Fios outside quite often repairing lines.

I've got 60Mbps/2Mbps (up/down) for 39 a month. I need more upload speed but that price jump to 110 was not worth it to me. Comcast business was no better.

Fios is almost a requirement for me at this point. It's the only decent internet I've had other than a local Seattle internet. But it's very hard to find apartments that list it. Their listings on site finder isn't the most up to date either.

Exactly, if I move out of this apartment I want to move somewhere with decent internet, but it's very difficult to screen for locations that have Fios available. It's one reason I haven't moved out of my current apartment already, it made the housing search much harder last time I tried.

Ideally I'd like to live somewhere that has both Fios and Philly Wisper available, so I have a choice if one or the other starts unexpectedly sucking.

https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov

I'll eat my hat if you get 95M more than 80% of the time on that 1G link.

I've been a disgruntled Comcast "customer" for years and I've given up trying to convince them to give me the throughput they're selling me.

I'm at a Coworking space that uses Philly Wisper exclusively. I just got 75 down 85 up. I totally recommend them as an affordable alternative to the big players in Philly that absolutely won't sell your data. I wish I could get them at home but they don't have a line of sight to my place :(

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/result/8326306965

949/892 today. I can check again at any time of day you'd like. I don't have anything automated for regular testing.

I'm getting 100/100 from Frontier (as much as I loathe their customer service) for $55/month. I don't see how $50 for 25/25 is a deal, or compelling.

I always thought it looked more like a vape-pen.

At least we can all agree it's ugly.

Wow! Never expected we would end up on HN.

Happy to answer any questions.

Mark

ps: Some press and a review.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/04/29/wisper-internet-se...

https://dangerouslyawesome.com/2016/05/what-its-like-to-have...

Any plans to service the areas outside of Philly? (I moved out 3-4 years ago, but am starting to miss it quite a bit.)

Either way, by even introducing competition like this, you're doing something fantastic. Kudos!

Thanks!

We're focused on covering much more of Philadelphia before we start looking to expand elsewhere.

Has Comcast given you any trouble yet? Like their lobbyist suddenly taking an interest in housing code that permits antennas or anything of that sort?

Do you have any concerns about the incumbents trying to cut you out of the market? Perhaps by lobbying to get your business shut out, or perhaps through some kind of smear campaign? Or something else - I wouldn't put anything past some of these existing suppliers. Do you see any action on their part against you?

No. We're too little to be a financial concern to them. Also, anything they might do would be a bad PR move for them. Then again, I'm sure we'd get more business from the Streisand effect. :-)

Any plans on supporting IPv6? I was disappointed to find that I couldn't reach IPv6 IP addresses when I visited Indy Hall.

What wireless hardware are you using? 60 ghz?

Can you point some cantennas down into Love Park / City Hall with an open AP? Free internet in a public place can be good advertising

This is a great idea

Can residential customers buy the business plan to get the higher bandwidth?

What frequencies do you use to serve the last mile? (not a potential customer) Do you see degraded performance during heavy rain?

That sounds really nice; I wish them all the best luck.

"PhillyWisper Residential service plans are designed for personal use for 8 hours a day for general internet use including streaming, web surfing, e-mail access, and all other possible online activities. Residential customers are not allowed to host public servers of any kind, use static (public) IPv4 IP addresses, or consume more bandwidth than required to support typical residential Internet activities. PhillyWisper may disconnect or limit the bandwidth for residential customers who use residential service for activities deemed atypical at PhillyWisper’s discretion.Connection speeds for Residential service plans will fluctuate based on network demand."

That's not so friendly. IN fact, it's rather badly defined.

No mention of IPv6.

> Residential customers are not allowed to . . . consume more bandwidth than required to support typical residential Internet activities. PhillyWisper may disconnect or limit the bandwidth for residential customers who use residential service for activities deemed atypical at PhillyWisper’s discretion.

This worries me much more than any privacy issues (which could easily be alleviated with a $5/mo. VPN).

Are we supposed to read their minds to determine what "typical" behavior we're allowed to engage in? Or should we just live in constant fear of our internet being arbitrarily disconnected?

This seems especially problematic given that many residential users don't know when something is taking significantly more data.

Eg my sister was surprised by how much of her quota was used by her Amazon fire stick

Yeah, it depends on enforcement.

I use a great rural, local WISP, and they expressly prohibit P2P download/uploading like BitTorrent, but it’s otherwise unlimited.

Hopefully PhillyWisper’s service is similarly structured.

Wow I can't believe I'm seeing this on HN!

I worked with the co-founder Mark Steckel, and he is about as good as they get. He takes privacy and security VERY seriously (he's the only person I know that actually uses PGP!) and he's one of those guys who has forgotten more about networking than I'll ever know in my lifetime.

He literally answered a call one time while on the roof of a building either setting up or tweaking service for someone!

I don't live in the Philly area any more, but if you do I'd be willing to bet my reputation that you'll love the ISP if you get them.

"East Kensington start-up"...I thought that was code for "crack house" or "junky graveyard".

I kid, I kid. Best of luck to them. That area could really use some success stories.

About 10-20 years ago, you'd be completely correct.

But that area has underwent some of the craziest transformations I've seen in a long time recently. Not exactly gentrified, but certainly more accepting of literally everyone.

Nobody pays a mil-plus for a building of 3-story condos on a former crack block unless it's gentrified. Northeast Philly is the new Williamsburg.

"Northeast Philly is the new Williamsburg"

That's a bit of a stretch...

I agree. Mark is knowledgeable and attentive. Given that they are a small player in a big space, they are very sensitive to customer issues and really strive to provide great service and uptime.

I have been a customer for 3 years and have been ecstatic with their service. I think there have been maybe 2 outages in 3 years, and within minutes Mark e-mailed everyone detailing what happened, why, what he was doing to fix it, and when he expected to have maintenance finished. Observed speeds are typically higher than SLAs and as long as Mark is in business I don't plan to use anyone else.

When he came to install equipment I got the opportunity to go up on my roof and "help" (I know v little about networking) but it made for a really fun afternoon.

What's the latency and speed like beyond the advertised speeds? That would be my biggest hold back and was why I didn't sign up for Clear a couple years back.

Clear was a horrible ISP.

For speed I regularly clock ~80 mbps down ~25 mbps up. This is pretty consistent (had a "slow" night on Sunday of ~60mbps when I checked).

Latency I haven't really paid much attention: I usually only check when it feels like something is wrong as a sanity check.

I look forward to see this business growing as it gives an alternative other than comcast and verizon which both have poor customer service. However, in Philly, 25 Mbps for $50 is expensive. In comparison I have been paying $70 a month for 100mbps with Verizon. Perhaps price will go down as customer base increases. I would also like to know more about the reliability of the service in bad weather.

I'm assuming it's using a similar technology as my mom's internet uses (hers has an antenna pointing at the local water tower). I can't think of a time that she's had weather related outages.

I have this service, in Philly, and weather is never an issue for me. I’ve had a total of maybe 3-4 brief (less than 5 minutes) outages in my year of service.

At first this struck me as expensive, in the sense that per Gbps, I get a much better price from Comcast. And then I remembered all of the externalities that come along with that price: data caps, potential monitoring, bad customer support and whatever else I'm forgetting.

How much is avoiding those actually worth to me? Probably pretty close to the price difference, actually, and if those things are really important to me I should be willing to walk the walk and pay for them.

I won't, because I don't live in Philadelphia, but I hope to have real viable alternatives where I do live.

Don't forget to read their customer agreement:

That sounds to me like exactly what Comcast does. Torrent too many files of open data? No internet for you.

ISPs have to put this in there to protect themselves. Most small ISPs don't care what you do or how much bandwidth you consume unless you are degrading the performance of their other customers.

Source: I used to work at a small WISP similar to philly wisper.

Sorry I caught this so late, but no, ISPs do not have to use language like this to protect themselves. They can also provide the bandwidth the customer is paying for 100% of the time (or give the customer's money back), like my company does: https://www.pilotfiber.com/legal

Wireless has become much better and robust in recent years, but I've honestly never been exposed to a wireless solution that was completely without issues. That's why I'll always prefer cables (as in fiber).

Not knowing much about Philadelphia, surely a city like that offers fiber to most houses in 2019, and it's probably not going to cost more than $50-100/month for an entry level package? I could be wrong.

Philly resident here, I pay no contract $79.99 for Fios gigabit.

Verizon here also offers a 100mbps option (I think it's that at least) for $39.99 I believe, so this is a bit expensive.

Those prices are only for the first year, I recently learned that when my $39.99 100/100 plan jumped to $55, and the customer service rep said it will jump to $65 the third year.

It would be a nice if they would put their tower(s) locations and their range circle on the site. That would at least give a running start if they can get a signal to the destination.

I'd rather not need to sign up to find this information out.

The tower is probably in a pretty dense area. If they start listing it people would probably freak out no?

You don't actually need to sign up to tell if you are in range.

Just check out the "Available now" section in the zip code drop down on the sign-up form.

19118 is listed as “later” but what does that realistically mean? Too many trees towering over rooftops in Chestnut Hill to provide coverage to most residents?

Ok, that wasn't intuitive from the form, it looked like you wanted a ton of info before I got to the zipcode. Maybe a hint on that page to look. Thanks!

I’ve had this for a year now & I love it. My speeds are typically twice what is advertised. FWIW, I used to have att gigabit for comparison.

I think that a lot of major cities have something like this... It just tends to not be advertised broadly. For instance, New Orleans (not exactly a tech hub) has at least 2 companies like this[0] and I've only accidentally found out about them. I wish I could try one of these, but I'm outside of their coverage area.

"WISP <city>" seems to be the search term if you're looking for something like this in your city.

[0] http://southwan.com/coverage/ & http://skycom1.com/about-us/ & https://www.nolabroadband.com/our-services/residential/

A few other ways to find WISPs in the U.S.:

http://www.wispa.org/Directories/Find-a-WISP

https://broadbandnow.com/

BroadbandNow uses data reported by ISPs to the FCC. Disclaimer: I do have a relationship with BroadbandNow, they sponsor a website that I run.

Very cool! Always great to see fellow WISP folks on HN! For those curious about the industry: there are something like 500 wireless ISPs (WISPs) in the U.S. and many more outside of the U.S. http://www.wispa.org is the de-facto standard organization in the U.S. and runs a few conferences throughout the year. The largest WISP in the U.S. today is Rise Broadband (https://www.risebroadband.com/) - most are considerably smaller. I worked at Rise for about 10 years and have spent basically my whole career working for Wireless ISPs in the U.S.

Philly tried to have a community mesh net years ago. It really didn't work out. Hopefully this fares better.

There have been at least 3 attempts. The current one is still lacking much of a community.

> we’ll just need clear line of sight from your roof to our towers

I don't know what the real estate market is like in the parts of Phila. they're operating in, but in an area with lots of new construction, this could be an interesting issue when a proposed new structure would block existing customers.

This happens regularly for regular cell towers. Even major operators can get hit. It can usually be solved within days even if not advertised in advance, but that's for those major operators who can afford to put up a lot of towers or micros.

> we’ll just need clear line of sight from your roof to our towers.

Wouldn't it make sense to also implement mesh networking locally, so you wouldn't need a line-of-sight connection to every subscriber?

I've used a similar provider, Stephouse in Portland, OR and they would routinely install repeaters throughout the city to help cover deadspots, areas shaded by tall buildings, hills, etc. I assume the same would be available in Philly with the advantage that Philly is quite flat by comparison.

Do these repeaters also require line-of-sight to the consumer, or do they use a different means of communication?

(Also this sounds a lot like an ordinary provider and not like the independence as claimed on the website. A mesh networking solution would achieve independence through peer-to-peer connectivity.)

Mesh networks at this scale are pretty complicated and messy. Also they tend to be pretty low capacity. It's an order of magnitude (or maybe two) more difficult to build and manage a high-capacity robust mesh network than to build a pure line of sight hub-and-spoke style network. (I've done both.)

I pay 90/month for 150. Seems like a major compromise

What are they using? I had Clear using WiMax for a few years and it was good enough until they shut down. I was tired of all the cable shenanigans.

I had Clear WiMax in a big metro for a few years and it was awful. Miserly speeds, lots of interference and congestion.

Modern wireless ISPs use a mesh of point-to-point directional radios operating on WiFi frequencies (see https://mikrotik.com/products/group/wireless-systems and https://www.ui.com/products/#airfiber for some popular products). These radios are much higher performance than WiMax (10 Gbit links are possible over short distances, 1 Gbit is normal over several miles) and suffer less interference because of directional antennas.

WISPs have been staging a quiet revolution across areas that don't see much competition. In San Francisco, known for atrocious bureaucracy preventing ISP competition, traditional fiber providers have been struggling to expand service for decades. Meanwhile, a local WISP called MonkeyBrains has quietly covered almost all of San Francisco and much of Oakland and Berkeley in their mesh, and is continuing to expand.

yeah, I was in Durham, NC and was pretty close to the tower. I don't think there was much congestion.

I would give anything for this in Baltimore.

I work out of Indyhall. Philly's most popular coworking space. I'm using Philly Whisper right now.

We only use it because Comcast couldn't keep our connection working. We're literally on Market street two blocks from Independence Hall. Within 5 blocks is the Philadelphia Mint. Numerous Federal courts, etc. And we still can't get a reliable connection.

Philly Whisper still goes down occasionally. We've had it go down twice in the past 60 days. They are super responsive but at the end of the day the internet going down for hours is still money lost.

I have FIOS at home and I've only ever seen it go down at night and it's because of a router update.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Comcast. Would not recommend.

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