WombatNET. Young Kiwi connects rural properties to high speed internet

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CYaBro

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#2700509 1-May-2021 16:22

nztim:

quickymart:

What happened? No/limited coverage?

There are parts of Upper Hutt that internet speeds are like its 2004

4mbps ADSL at best, some of those areas are due to get Fibre by 2022 but others its going to be 4mbps for the forseeable futre

Starlink should change all that though, if the service becomes affordable, and caps are of a decent size

There is no data cap currently. And $159 a month isn't bad when your only other option is crap or no internet.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

nztim

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#2700514 1-May-2021 17:17

CYaBro:

There is no data cap currently. And $159 a month isn't bad when your only other option is crap or no internet.

"Currently" and the $800 up front is still a killer

Any views expressed on these forums are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

quickymart

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#2700516 1-May-2021 17:23

Dratsab:

He's outside of the WombatNET coverage area so initially they didn't bother responding to his query. When he sent another one, about 6 months later, and indicated they could put a repeater on his land (he has some good elevation which would give coverage to around another 32 houses) they wanted $6k.

Interesting, in the initial story here ( https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/116299044/teenager-creates-company-to-get-highspeed-network-to-rural-communities ) he says:

WombatNet would have a radio for every 5km radius. "Then we know people can get full speeds in that radius and if there's someone out of that then we'll build another tower."

I got the impression (from reading that) he would be covering the cost of that...but I guess not.

alexstewartwnet

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#2700576 1-May-2021 23:25

Hi Everyone, Alex here.

This thread has been brought to my attention and while I don't normally meddle with discussions about me or the company, I think it's important to both stay on top of misinformation and be active within the community.

Upon first glance at the articles about me, you could infer that I'm passively discrediting other WISP's and that is absolutely not the case. As several have mentioned, the WISP business model is far from new and there are many other established guys/girls that have been in the industry longer than I've been alive.

Maybe I explained myself poorly or maybe my 'layman's-terms' background story is hard to resonate with when you're in the know, but what I wanted people to take away from my story was not that I had created a brand-new concept, but that (especially with people my age) truly anything is possible if you have the right drive, determination, and support.

Regardless of what kind of business I had decided to start, taking on such a time and mentally-consuming role as a teen would be both a massive undertaking and achievement for anyone.

Our growth has been somewhat limited by our available manpower, (it's been just me for over a year!!) but as we add more people to our team, the number of new sites we're able to bring online each month will only grow.

As the latest article mentioned, we currently have 10 sites on our network; all of which are built to operate at the highest level of uptime reasonably possible, both electronically and physically.

Coverage over central UH is simply a bi-product of the tower locations - i.e: we don't generally connect those in UFB areas as it's not even worth trying to compete.

Our current wireless footprint has coverage to 1200+ rural/lifestyle properties, and we have a good percentage of those connected to the network. We don't have any WISP competitors and can deliver a service that is normally faster than RBI, but also many times cheaper and unlimited.

@nztim A little competition keeps you on your toes 😄 - We'll be transitioning our on-contract customer to our UFB product/s as they become available.

@sbiddle I don't know enough about the inner workings of DSL to properly comment, but it definitely has its place. We've noticed that those who are 10-500m from the cabinet who can get decent speeds normally just stick with DSL as the difference wouldn't be noticeable enough, but we have hundreds of leads (many on KMD) within the VDSL footprint that follow-up regularly with abysmal speed test results on hand. I don't know what the reasoning behind the terrible performance is, but the complaints have been pretty consistent, even from those in new builds, or those who regularly have Chorus techs onsite.

StarLink will also have its place and I'm sure it'll help a lot of those that we've had to turn away, but unless their prices drop substantially I'm not too worried about them affecting our clientele. We've been able to consistently deliver symmetrical speeds of ~135Mb/s with latencies ranging from 5-30ms depending on the tower. We actually have plans to utilize StarLink (& OneWeb as it becomes available) to act as a failover backhaul to some of our larger sites.

@dratsab @quickymart we only have 1 (prelim) quote that high ($5.1k) and that was for a network extension via fiber. It was a low-lying property impossible to service via wireless and we offered to build in extra capacity to allow the property owner to on-sell the service to his neighbors to offset the setup cost. We've never quoted a tower build in Whiteman's Valley and for the most part, we cover the cost of and pay leases for the location of even small towers. I would imagine we wouldn't get very far if we asked the public to fund towers for our own financial gain.

Feel free to shoot through any other questions.

^AS

nztim

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#2700784 2-May-2021 14:02

First of all good on you for joining these forums - good to have RSP representation on here

alexstewartwnet:

@nztim A little competition keeps you on your toes 😄 - We'll be transitioning our on-contract customer to our UFB product/s as they become available.

Absoutely and in my case, you could do better than us, so well done :)

alexstewartwnet:

@sbiddle I don't know enough about the inner workings of DSL to properly comment, but it definitely has its place. We've noticed that those who are 10-500m from the cabinet who can get decent speeds normally just stick with DSL as the difference wouldn't be noticeable enough, but we have hundreds of leads (many on KMD) within the VDSL footprint that follow-up regularly with abysmal speed test results on hand. I don't know what the reasoning behind the terrible performance is, but the complaints have been pretty consistent, even from those in new builds, or those who regularly have Chorus techs onsite.

To answer this, on a good line ELT distances of up to 500M should give sync speeds of circa 110mbps on a 17a profile shorter will give speeds up to a max of 130mbps (limited by chorus)

Those who are not getting these speeds most 90% of the time can solve their problems for the sake of a $10 master filter from PBtech or any electrical wholesale store

the remaining 10% would need the flat ribbon cable from the street to their ETP replaced by chorus (if their house was built before circa 1987)

Any views expressed on these forums are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

alexstewartwnet

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#2700793 2-May-2021 14:48

Not long ago we took over a relay tower that was directly fed by VDSL (less than a metre from the cabinet!) and the most we could get out of that connection was 45-50Mb/s. This was with ~5-year-old ribbon and a single jack.

As I said, I'm not super experienced with the xDSL network or its troubleshooting steps, but the feedback has been pretty consistent across all properties on the network, and the connections only seem to get slower and more intermittent the further the homes are from the cabinet.

Before switching to us many of our customers have said that upon callout, the Chorus techs have either returned with a no-fault-found charge or have said that there is nothing they can do short of digging up the street and replacing the distribution network as its quote, "completely waterlogged".

^AS

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