WISP offering rural wireless up to 100Mbps

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myfullflavour

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Full Flavour

#290196 26-Oct-2021 20:45

This is something you'll probably see soon from the other WISPs, but we (Full Flavour) may be one of the first to have done this - we're now offering 100Mbps download (and 30Mbps upload) plans on our WISP network:

https://fullflavour.nz/rural-broadband/rural-wireless

I'm probably biased, but I'm thinking this is a competitive offering against Starlink, in particular as our WISP (and WISPs in general) offer much better latency and packet loss.

We're achieving this with what's available today from our vendor, ePMP4000 is just around the corner, and with it, I'd expect 100Mbps to become standard and even faster plan speeds to come to market.

tim0001

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#2801944 27-Oct-2021 13:01

@myfullflavour. In my opinion, your plans look very competitive compared to Starlink. We would have gone with a WISP if they were able to provide service. (I think we asked about 7 over the years. Lack of road access to the repeater site seems to be the main stumbling block).

Currently the speeds provided by Starlink are more than we need. I’ve got a speed test script running on our starlink connection, and the average is around 180Mbps. Just ran some ping tests over the last hour or so (0.5%):

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---

4551 packets transmitted, 4527 received, 0% packet loss, time 4555729ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 45.458/55.986/99.703/8.840 ms

One disadvantage to Starlink is the electricity cost, Currently ours is using 81W (approx $180 per year). (I believe that the hardware that is shipping now uses about half the power). Hopefully when the beta is finished the power consumption will go down. One of the firmware versions we had only used 65W.

Do you think that LEO backhaul will enable WISPs to cover more customers in the future?

michaelmurfy

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#2801967 27-Oct-2021 14:18

The other thing to remember is as more and more customers get onto Starlink my bets are things will slow down. Also, CG-NAT only, chance of "roaming" over to Aussie and like you say (@tim0001) power use.

Personally for a home internet solution as cool as Starlink is (and this is seriously a gamechanger for those in Haast or the sounds for example) it is far from perfect. If I could, I'd rather a P2P Wireless solution for reliability alone + it is way more likely you're going to at-least achieve the minimum speed of your plan vs no actual quoted speed with Starlink. I would imagine that @myfullflavour will be monitoring their network and adding additional capacity where needed. You can also get more specialized stuff such as a static IP, IPv6 as well as local support when something breaks (this is a huge problem with Starlink also because you have to wait for a new dishy).

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quickymart

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#2802030 27-Oct-2021 14:44

Haast has fibre now Mike, remember? :) but I hear what you're saying re the Marlborough Sounds, most of that will never get fibre outside of Picton.

nztim

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#2802034 27-Oct-2021 15:01

michaelmurfy:

The other thing to remember is as more and more customers get onto Starlink my bets are things will slow down. Also, CG-NAT only, chance of "roaming" over to Aussie and like you say (@tim0001) power use.

Personally for a home internet solution as cool as Starlink is (and this is seriously a gamechanger for those in Haast or the sounds for example) it is far from perfect. If I could, I'd rather a P2P Wireless solution for reliability alone + it is way more likely you're going to at-least achieve the minimum speed of your plan vs no actual quoted speed with Starlink. I would imagine that @myfullflavour will be monitoring their network and adding additional capacity where needed. You can also get more specialized stuff such as a static IP, IPv6 as well as local support when something breaks (this is a huge problem with Starlink also because you have to wait for a new dishy).

Also as more and more customers onboard Starlink we are likely to see datacaps with all things radio nothing is "unlimited"

I personally wouldn't recomend starlink unless VDSL was below 50mbps and there was no available WISP available

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tim0001

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#2802120 27-Oct-2021 17:25

The dish is a single point of failure that did worry me for a bit. Then a couple of our neighbours got starlink too (they are now “plan B”). The rest of the network has more resilience than most terrestrial networks (eg multiple sats and ground stations).

I’m optimistic about Starlink capacity in NZ. Starlink is global and is being designed to have enough capacity for North America and Europe. Luckily the same satellites fly over us. The performance in NZ will possibly be even better because:

our low population density
less land area under each satellite (ie there is a lot of sea under each satellite) , which further reduces the number of people served per satellite

But yeah, WISP or VDSL/fibre is probably the 1st choice for most situations.

raytaylor

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#2804316 30-Oct-2021 15:05

tim0001:

Do you think that LEO backhaul will enable WISPs to cover more customers in the future?

Trying to run an 80 watt load (for just the sat dish kit) is about a $20k cost in solar and battery - not many farmers will let you lease a hilltop and put a 4kw solar array up and ruin their view.

We can do a lot more speed with a lot less power requirements if the radio paths stay within the earths atmosphere.

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tim0001

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#2804483 30-Oct-2021 18:41

I was thinking about areas that the WISPs (and RCG) can't economically provide backhaul eg surrounded by DOC hills

For example locally there are probably 70+ people who would pay $90/m for a solid 10Mbps, but they can't justify starlink. The LEO backhaul dish could be powered off the mains in someones house.

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hio77

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#2804512 30-Oct-2021 22:20

a few wisps out there doing 100mbit plans of E4000s.

Great to see you joining the ranks Jesse!

They sure have a few quirks to ubiquiti sectors.

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