Internet Source

[Wifi442]

When you run a WISP where do you get your internet source from? Most of the Sources available such as DSL, FIOS, CABLE etc all have a T.O.S that states you cannot resell their service. Just wondering how most of you go about this and how much more it costs over the above mentioned services.

[UBNT-Mike.Ford]

I believe a lot of the guys uses T1 and Bonded T1 services.

Mike

[MaximumISP]

Bonded DSls here through a third party telecom company
very economical and no issues with reselling

These are bonded lines not load balanced we started with load balanced ones then made the move to bonded

[WHT]

A single T1 here costs between $600 and $800 per month. I single 10 Meg DSL costs under $80

You can bond T1 for higher speeds, but its unrealistic to bond DSL circuits as that require you to put your own hardware at the DSLAM end. We have multiple 10 Meg DSL lines and no, that doesn't mean we have a 40 or 50 Meg internet connection...it just means we can spread out the load more evenly.

DSL has no SLA, about once a year all the DSL service in the county goes down for a few hours. Eventually, we'll get DSL from other carries outside the county for backup.

T1 has a SLA, but anecdotal reports say its still hours before it can be fixed. Big deal...what can you do? Ask for a free month of service because they failed to meet the contractual SLA agreement? That's not going to help when you have customers calling and complaining.

[netmaster]

After having a misery called "multiple DSL connections" for several years, nothing beats a gigabit fiber, directly from telco's backbone. Symmetric, full duplex 120Mbps by now, for around $10000 per month. It's is expensive, but no worries at all.

[rodneal]

I would say go back and negotiate with the telco for fiber.
Most TOS are negotiable if you have it listed in your service agreement/contract and you have a knowledgeable service rep who understands the technology and industry.
Rod
PS - Never pay the listed price - ever! Negotiate and work your way up the food chain. Look for resellers of the same product.

[jp498]

We started with 56k leased line, multiplied, went to dual T1s, then multiple T1s, then T3, now we have multiple fibers to a bigger non-telco ISP.

Fiber is good, not dealing with the phone company is even better.

[rodneal]

Amen! Brother...

Rod

[zirculs]

Just to add a follow-up question related to this thread if you guys wont mind... What should be the ideal contention ratio for a regular WISP? How many clients can be accommodated to a single T1 at 512 kbps so your backbone won't be congested or wisp business is not overly subscribed?

[WHT]

Before bloated web pages full of gratuitous Flash animation, streaming video, streaming radio stations, TV programs, one user with with 5,000 open BitTorrent connections....you could stack 100 users per one T1, or 10 biz users (as they had a network of computers), or one power user.

But now, it seems that a single T1 will barely serve ten users.

[DieselPower]

I have 3Meg DSL and am able to run about 20 768K home and 2 768K business users per line. I see saturated connections every once in a while, but everyone is happy. Here is a 24hr graph of one of my lines with 21 Home and 2 business clients on it.

http://orbwireless.net/1day.png

[six]

Just to plant another idea in your mind - It is getting to the point where anyone providing 512 or 768 is going to have a difficult time remaining competitive in the US and most of Western Europe. There will always be unserved and underserved rural markets, but the cell carriers have been dedicating resources for data. - My personal cell phone can be turned into a wireless hotspot in three taps of the screen and serve 3 megabit to multiple users. I have installed more than a handful of Cradlepoint mobile routers for rural users with EVDO modems. I see USB and PCMCIA data cards more and more often.

T-1's don't make much sense any more.

[pcampbell]

Diesel - cool graph. For some reason I would have thought "outbound" would be back to the internet. Is this backwards?

And... Cummins or PowerStroke? ;)

[DieselPower]

Hehe, Cummins and the 'ol green Detroit 2-cycles are my favs! I actually run a fairly busy diesel and truck repair shop as well as this WISP that is growing so fast i can't keep up... Gonna have to get rid of one of them. or hire someone.


That graph is generated with Cacti, and is from my NOC's point of veiw, so outbound is out to the tower, and inbound is back from the tower. So it is backwards. You may want to check out Cacti, its pretty cool once you get it set up.

[rconaway]

With DSL though you can allow users multiple DSL connections with a load-balancing router. We use a Peplink 300 with 3 DSL circutis very successfully although you can use 7 or more with bigger routers. The maximum bandwidth is the limit of a single DSL.

[harry_the_face]

so what kind of prices are you DSL user getting, and is it from the telco or third party?

and (this is probably a totally dumb question but) what about cable internet.

One final ?

Where are you line located? On you property, customer property, or the telco pole?

[DieselPower]

Our lines are located in a small pumphouse that the City owns, It's on a hill right next to the city water tank. We then have a 5.8G link from the cities 100ft tower to 460ft tower 3 miles away. I'm paying $173/M per 3Mb dsl line with a resale contract.

Now, with that hight tower, and being in the cities back pocket like that, you may think we are a huge WISP that started with a lot of money... Actually, we started with just what we had in our back pockets, we were paying for one DSL line, $200/mo for the tower lease, and $50/mo for a small closet in town for the servers and DSL. Now we trade tower space of internet service to the tower, and we are in the pumphouse (actually a very nice little building) free! Our only operating costs at this time are our DSL lines!

Go to any meetings being held about high speed coverage, find out what's going on, and make yourself present. Talk to your local radio station guy, he's probably real nice, and probably wants high speed internet at is house too... See if you can make a deal with him to use the tower. Then, if DSL is not available at the Tower, talk to the city, you never know what might happen with some little shed up by the water tower!

Just my 2c

[jcrites2008]

I know some place that is offering 256 kbps as their basic plan.

[six]

We use a Peplink 300

Like it? How's the performance? I read peplink is the way to go if you need to do more than 40 megabit through your WANs I have a mixture of hotbrick and Syswan deployed. And, I picked up a TP-Link the other day to try it out. The Syswan is good, but the Hotbricks leave a lot to be desired. I'll probably find the time to test the TP-Link next week.

I have a Syswan SW24VPN at home connected to my cable modem and an NS2 on my WAN2 pulling my brother-in-laws connection from across the street. I have a 20X5 and he has a 15X3 connection and I've been able to pull 32+ megabit through my WANs. They advertise 40+ megabit WAN to LAN is possible, but I haven't confirmed it on my bench.

Does the peplink stack up to that? Is it worth the extra $$?