I have posted various times about our RBI issues. We are with Netspeed which uses a Vodafone mast to supply our signal. There is only one mast we can communicate with and it is about 20 km away. In the past I have been able to get good speeds with two outdoor antennas but that was a long time ago. Over time our connection seems to have become worse and worse. Based on my experience and what I have been told, this appears to be due to congestion. In the afternoon we often get excellent performance and Ookla speed tests can reach 30 Mbps down. In the evening, usually right around 8 pm, this drops to the point that live streaming becomes nearly impossible, with often high latency and download speeds under 2 Mbps. We also often experience this on weekends and during school holidays, all of which seems to point to mast congestion.

When our RBI works well, it works very well. But when things get busy, usually exactly when we want to watch something, it can be hopeless, with constant buffering and freezing. This is very frustrating but we have put up with it because we didn't have an alternative. Until now.

The alternative is a local WISP, operated by regional provider AO Net. We have perfect line of sight to a nearby tower from a hill behind our house. Unfortunately, the hill blocks the tower from the house, but the WISP installer thinks we can get away with a lengthy antenna cable run. We have measured it out and it comes to nearly exactly 80 meters, which the installer says is at the extreme end but should still work. 

The WISP says it can provide download speeds "up to" 30 Mbps. I'm not sure what that means in this case. I wouldn't want much slower but I suppose 15-20 Mbps would be okay if it didn't drop below that, as is currently the case with RBI, which often jumps all over the place. This is especially apparent when trying to stream something with adaptive streaming as the picture quality keeps changing.

I don't know anything about WISP technology, except that it operates at microwave frequencies. I would be interested to know what our resident experts think about this. Is a WISP with 80 meters of antenna cable likely to do any better than our current RBI set-up? What about reliability? Is this something worth trying? It would really be nice to just be able to sit down when we want to and stream what we want to.