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Comment by 293984j29384 | Hacker News Reader

A wireless mesh network is not an alternative to fiber based internet. It's a great idea and has many useful applications but it's slow. Loop Internet sells symmetrical gigabit for $65/month. The laser receiver on the top of your building (NYC Mesh has been known to use a Ubiquiti LiteBeam AC Gen2) typically has less than 350-450 Mbps of bandwidth total and that's for the entire building to share. I have 30~ units in my building. How well is that mesh networking going to scale? Is it better than say, dial-up? Sure. Is it better than basically any other type of broadband? No.

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>The laser receiver on the top of your building (NYC Mesh has been known to use a Ubiquiti LiteBeam AC Gen2) typically has less than 350-450 Mbps of bandwidth total and that's for the entire building to share. I have 30~ units in my building.

If you already have line of sight I don't see a reason this couldn't be replaced with a 60ghz 802.11ad link, which should give you 4.6 gigabits.

Hadn't come across 802.11ad, but Wikipedia seems to think it's range is "just a few meters"[0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ad

That range is true in a typical household setup with an omnidirectional antenna and things like... walls.

If you have line of sight though and a fixed point to point link the range is much greater, since there's nothing in the way and an dish antenna gives you huge gain.

https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switc...

From the linked page:

"Ideal for high-throughput connectivity with a range of up to 500 m".

For reference, that approximately two blocks in NYC.

That's for maximum bandwidth. You can go farther if you want with slower speeds.

Anyway, I looked up the Ubiquiti LiteBeam AC Gen2 since I wasn't familiar with it, and I think OP might have the wrong impression. It's a LiteBeam, not a LightBeam. The LiteBeam is just bog standard 5 GHz 802.11ac with a high gain antenna. That explains the data rates.

Given that, there seems to be no disadvantage to using the 60 GHz solution if you're close enough to the next building where it's still faster (probably close to 2 miles). It's only ~$200 more, which spread out over a building is basically nothing.

How are you getting from 500m to 2 miles? Is there any data to support this?

Ubiquiti makes gigabit speed wireless backhaul devices in the unlicensed 24Ghz band. It's the AF24HD. They can go several miles, but are susceptible to the signal dropping in the rain depending on your climate.

MikroTik makes some 60Ghz point to point gigabit radios that can supposedly go for 2km.

Finally, many commercial providers of E-band devices (licensed 70-80Ghz spectrum) sell gigabit capable radios that can go a couple of miles.

Any of those seem like good options for an urban building in need of better internet service.

Those are likely great options for people and small groups that don't have other options. At the same time, I doubt you'll see many companies jumping to provide that service, at least not ones that have the experience to handle it appropriately.

Wireless internet makes for a very poor product to sell, because the service is unreliable, and often has problems exactly when people want it most (during inclement weather). Also, customers often have a problem dissassociating problems that should be expected with the service from problems with the service provider. It's probably not very gratifying to provide what is often the only option people have for high speed internet to have some subset of them that don't understand the reality, or are just too upset to care, disparage your name online. It also probably doesn't lead to securing additional contracts easily, and as soon as other connectivity does become available, your customers will leave at the earliest opportunity (there's not a lot of friction to signing up somewhere else when the service is currently down).

I'm no RF engineer, but I'm pretty sure a 60Ghz link will be crippled when it rains.

as will the laser

presumably you can have more than one laser link using the same frequency and bandwidth of light since it is a laser beam just put the next link a couple meters over and they should not interfere with each other at all.

The parent comment is confused. NYC mesh doesn't use actual laser beams, they use a cheap 5Ghz TDMA solution made by Ubiquiti called Litebeam. Interference can be a big issue for this equipment, especially in an urban environment with a high noise floor.

(No affiliation with NYC folks, just a WISP guy handing out the basics)

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