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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

What about the customers though? My family used to be chained to a WISP, and we paid $100/month for internet that made dial-up look like a viable competitor. Not to mention, downtime was atrocious (1/10th of the time the service would just be out).

I think the bigger argument for not starting a WISP is that nobody wants to be a guinea pig in your amateur networking project.

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(Author here) WISPs are more like local restaurants than big chains. Some local restaurants are terrible. At least with a big chain you know what you're going to get.

That being said, the WISP you had probably just didn't know what they're doing. Which is true of a lot of WISPs (and small restaurant owners!) And is actually in large part what motivated me to write this guide! I'd like to believe that if they followed the guide, and/or gave me a call to help out with the parts they're struggling with, we could fix it. I'm personally involved in running several WISPs right now, and without exception we are providing 100mbps+ service, <20ms latency, and at least 99.9% uptime measured to the customer.

FWIW, and not to undersell the challenges, but I think you're extrapolating too much from a single example (and possibly an old one). The started-tiny-and-local WISP around here is $100 a month for 50/50 and it's been pretty rock solid. While I certainly haven't run a WISP myself, I have set up point to multipoint wireless networks for some local businesses, and with current equipment it's impressive how straight forward and relatively turnkey the basics of the physical link itself have become. It was no problem to have dozens of points over distances of 5-16 miles with solid 100-400 Mbps links. My understanding from far more senior people and reading about real WISPs is that there is a non-linear increase in difficulty/expense over greater distances, scaling up to hundreds/thousands of points, and handling things for multiple independent entities rather then what is effectively a big LAN even if sectioned up with VLANs. There's also completely non-technical challenges to be ready to deal with like compliance departments and legal/law enforcement interaction aspects of when a customer inevitably does something naughty. The path has been tread but it wasn't anything I've had to deal with.

Still, if I was still in an area with dial up speeds and Starlink wasn't a thing, helping jury rig up neighbors with a mini-WISP is a project I'd certainly consider contributing to and believe could be quite reliable and easily beat out DSL at least.

Also speaking of Starlink, I'll be curious if a side aspect of them would be driving phased arrays in general down in price significantly. That'd be a pretty interesting development for terrestrial PtP/PtMP imho, since a lot of the trickiness over long distances is precise aiming. If the antenna merely needed to be aimed with 10-20° and then could perfectly align with the other from there, including real time adjustments for some motion or interference, that'd be another pretty cool improvement. And for the time being at least Starlink has left an opening in that the connections are quite asymmetrical (ie., 200 down but only 30-40 up), which is challenging to work around given their physical and economic constraints. Whereas a WISP can be full symmetric right up to gigabit speeds, assuming their backbone supports it. That could let some remain competitive beyond just density limits.

The phased array wisp thing has been tried before and failed. People seem to think that wisp is somehow using different physics than 4/5G. In reality it's more like Joe's taxi vs Uber.

>The phased array wisp thing has been tried before and failed.

Examples? I don't know of any phased array PtP/PtMP system, at all, in anything like the form factor and pricing of Starlink or something like Ubiquiti's airMAX/airFiber/LTU series operating in the 5, 11, or 24GHz class spectrums. In fact your whole comment makes zero freaking sense, what do you mean "phased array wisp thing"? I don't see how it'd fundamentally be any different then all the very successful WISPs I'm familiar with, or for that matter the LR-LAN stuff that I've done myself. The advantage would be in that one of the trickier bits at longer ranges is getting alignment just right, labor or kit correcting for shifts, and tradeoffs in allocating regulatory max transmission power budget across end points. Skilled personnel can of course learn the alignment part reasonably and an important differentiator for a long time amongst different kit was the kind of tools it had to help with alignment. But it's not nothing and it can take a while, and then there is the rest.

A phased array system like Starlink's that could make its way into $150-500 CPE and hopefully <$5k basestation would be a nice evolution. Only need to get it roughly aimed in the right direction and then the system does the rest with no further human intervention, zero skill required. Basestation could extremely rapidly reallocate high power to various end points which matches consumer load patterns well rather then having to pick 30°/60/90/120/3x30/whatever sector antennas or 4'+ dedicated big boys for real distance.

I have no idea where this "4/5g physics" thing came into your head from. We're not talking physics we're talking economics and barrier to entry.

Is Starlink such a big deal that it would materially affect phased array costs? Cell base stations are already ubiquitous. From my own experience with phased array systems, the big cost is usually in the massive FPGAs that are needed to process all the incoming data in parallel.

>Is Starlink such a big deal that it would materially affect phased array costs?

I guess I think the Starlink terminal is technically one of the coolest and least appreciated aspect of the whole system. Sure it's not a military AESA system but getting that level of phased array into a 100W all weather CPE with a $500 target price they plan to produce tens of millions of is something I don't think has ever been done before, and it definitely could blaze a trail in terms of economies of scale there. SpaceX's rockets and sats seem to get most of the press, and are certainly critical, but the terminal is also a big deal IMO.

I mean, think about it: they've built an end point that will do a point to point link of 500+km to base stations with relative velocities of kilometers per second and can user-imperceptibly swap between multiple ones in real time while maintaining a bandwidth of hundreds of megabits per second. For $500 (granted it's probably costing them at least double/triple that right now, but they aren't making tens of millions yet either). A much more cut down, cheaper version of that could still make a number of terrestrial PtP/PtMP links a great deal easier for random people to take a swing at and get even better results with then now.

Again, I'm certainly no expert at all. But I've kicked the tires on a little of this stuff a bit, recently got my first chance to work with second gen 60 GHz links for example and those feel like a certain amount of work to get just right over multi-km ranges. But if for another $100 suddenly they just handle it themselves as long as they're within 10-20° horizontal/vertical? It'd make some aspects of installs more accessible and cheaper which doesn't seem like a bad thing to look forward to?

OP is of course right that none of this addresses the many other aspects of doing networking.

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