[olug] starting broadband ISP, any suggestions?

[Sam Tetherow]

There are a couple of manufacturers in the space although only one that 
i know of is actually shipping product.  You need an experimental 
license (which is not hard to get) to use the equipment and you will 
need deep pockets for the forseeable future.  APs seem to be in the $4k 
range with CPEs in the $800 range.  Which in and of itself is not 
horribly bad, you can spend that on other wireless gear, but when you 
look at the specs you are realistically looking at between 8-16Mbps over 
the air rate per 6MHz channel, so figure 4-8Mbps TCP throughput per AP, 
per channel, there is some talk of bonding two channels together, but 
that is still only 8-16Mbps which is about 2-3 times 802.11b rates.

I'm sure that they will be able to increase this some with MIMO, but the 
problem you run into at that low of frequency is your datarate will be 
inherently lower due to physics and you noise floor will be higher due 
to signal propagation (assuming any install density).

The FCC announced that they are going to Incentive Auction some of the 
TVWS although they have not said how much.  There is a persistent belief 
that some of the spectrum will be reserved for unlicensed/licensed-lite 
use but until the the auction rules are set we will not know how much.  
In rural areas it will be better, since there are more open channels 
than in urban areas and anyone willing to buy the spectrum is going to 
be interested in purchasing nationwide blocks, not piecemeal parcels.

Realistically, from a broadband provider front we will not see generally 
available equipment for 6-12 months, and we will not see any sort of 
mass produced, affordable equipment for 18-24 months.

I'm not sure where things are from a 'consumer' product standpoint, but 
my guess is it will be even farther out, and depending on the FCC rules 
it could be longer depending on how much spectrum is reserved.


On 10/12/2012 12:16 PM, Rob Townley wrote:
> Whatever happened to whitespaces spectrum?
>
> On a sidenote, i don't care if BigBird gets funded by IRS money, but
> the rural TV towers themselves and maybe WhiteSpace ISPs in rural
> areas make sense to me.
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Chris Brandstetter
> <sirloxelroy at gmail.com> wrote:
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