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Ask HN: How to Become a Wireless ISP?

4 points by hawski ↗ HN
Hello,

My sister in law has a problem to get a good Internet connection. Her house is a few hundred meters from fiber, but no company is interested to connect the few houses on her street. She has a picky LTE with not enough transfer limit. I can see from her home a light industry building, that seems to be high enough to be visible from most fiber-orphaned houses. AFAIK it has fiber connection.

The question is how could I setup a radio ISP. I read about Ubiquiti's airmax, which has relatively cheap and nice devices. But I lack terminology or knowledge what is required for all this to work. I also know that for this idea to work I would have to share the connection with more neighboring houses, to amortize the cost of the rent on the roof. So what should I know to setup an ISP from a single roof to multiple houses?

I think this idea is far fetched, but it's something I would love to read about those modern radio technologies, but I don't know where to start.

Thanks

7 comments

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sigmaprimus
I would use SME server to do it but a QaD way might be just flashing a decent router with DD-WRT. In any case I would make sure You get a deposit from your potential customers first, many people say they want things but then flake out when the time comes to pay.
sigmaprimus
Also You may want to look into Starlink before getting too serious, it may be disrupting the current ISP paradigms.
hawski
From what I've read it's 4 times more expensive than the absolute top consumer connection here (8.5 Gbps fiber). So for some considerable future: not in my country.
sigmaprimus
Up here in Canada so in CAD, it is $650 for hardware plus $49 delivery, then $139 per month.
hawski
Wouldn't DD-WRT mean a Wi-Fi router? You can get coverage a few hundred meters from the location?
sigmaprimus
Depending on the antennas and which WiFi router you use, yes a few KM is doable.

For the situation You described I would suggest having a PC based server (like SME) on the roof of the industrial building, then a DD-WRT client bridge with a "Yaggi" antenna on every customers house. The SME server will provide client specific control of internet access and logs, the logs will protect You from being accused of say pedophilia or incitement etc. if one of your customers is up to no good.

But to answer your question, yes if You have line of sight from the house to the building, with the proper directional antennas the range is unlimited.

jharohit
startyourownisp.com

Pretty much contains most of the resources you need