residential/smb internet access in 2019 - help?

Wed Mar 27 20:04:07 UTC 2019

On 3/27/19 3:30 PM, TJ Trout wrote:
> You are way out of line, and grouping a whole industry into your experience
> with (probably) one hack

I don't think I'm out of line, I'm relating what I've seen time and time
again.  Most WISP's are poorly capitalized and have to run extremely lean.
Most WISP's cannot afford to employ experienced engineering staff.  This
causes problems in any company, let alone one where a lightning strike can
take out an entire tower of equipment. Couple this with a lack of RF savvy
engineering and failures are inevitable.

Looking at the website of http://pcguys.us/services.html, one can see the
highest service offered is "5.0Mbps" and pricing is 89.99/month for this
service.  I've got 45 Mbit/s on my Tmobile LTE card, and fully unlimited is in
the same ballpark.

Looking at the typical equipment used (64 QAM, 20 MHz channel), you're going
to have a raw bitrate of around 80 mbit/s.  Couple this with overhead and some
inevitable interference and an access point will have about 50 mbit's of large
frame capacity.  This is not much, and every client added will slightly reduce
this due to multicast and supervisory signaling losses.  Each system is going
to be Time Division Duplex (using the same channel for transmit and receive),
so you will split this say 75/25 down/up stream.  This means you have at best
37.5 Mbit/s available for all clients to share, which isn't much for a 90 or
120 degree sector out to 10 miles (or more) depending on density.

802.16 WIMAX had several things to address these issues, but it's dead and
slow.  In the US (as this is NANOG), few operators had the 3.65 GHz licenses
for true wimax, and CBRS is eclipsing these licensed operators shortly.

Wireless has it's place, but Point-to-Multi-Point broadband on 5 GHz is not it.

-- 
Bryan Fields

727-409-1194 - Voice
http://bryanfields.net