[clue-talk] Wispertel

[Nate Duehr]

dperkins at techangle.com wrote:

>Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of Wispertel?  They offer
>wireless ISP service.
>
>www.wispertel.com
>  
>
I know you already got a number of positive responses, but I'll add 
another $0.02.

I'm on the tech crew and BoD of a ham radio club, The Colorado Repeater 
Association -- www.w0cra.org.  (Yeah, don't laugh at the website, it 
sucks.  We know.  Heh.)

We've been using Wispertel for wireless connectivity to our Conifer 
Mountain site for over a year and it's been virtually flawless.  Our 
radio site is actually higher than the site Wispertel's RF folks wanted 
us hanging off of, so it looks pretty funny to have the dish with built 
in up-tilt pointing down at the ground from the tower, but it works!  (GRIN)

I also know a couple of their operations guys personally, and they have 
something going for them that many wireless ISP's did not, at least 
early on when WISP services started up around here... and this may have 
changed since then, but at first -- most local WISP services were mom 
and pop shops, who were computer people first, and RF 
engineers/techicians second. 

Wispertel's core operations team were RF guys first (most worked in the 
2-way radio and cellular industries, building a lot of the cellular 
infrastructure in Colorado for a couple of different carriers and 
running their own 2-way businesses), and then they quickly learned that 
F/OSS software was the successful path for their ISP to be profitable in 
the long-run.  Being that they know RF very well, their over-the-air 
backbone (45 Mb/s with mulitple redundant routes to most main sites) and 
technology is very good. 

They also know without a shadow of a doubt that Windows servers don't 
provide them the reliability or the simplicity they need to provide a 
24/7 service.  They originally started out with some FreeBSD stuff, and 
very early on migrated almost everything over to Linux.  Every time I 
talk to them they're adding/upgrading hardware, and they're not skimping 
on putting money back into their infrastructure, which is more than I 
can say for even some of the local wireline-based ISP's.

IMHO, the only other well-designed wireless network that competes 
locally is Mesa Networks, and they did it by purchasing a Motorola 
Canopy system.  Wispertel took off-the-shelf gear from Trango Wireless 
and probably paid a whole lot less overall for their RF gear, but had to 
have some clue about how to build/design a network.  Canopy is great 
gear, and from everything I've read, rediculously easy for the 
installers/techs to set up... but damn spendy -- like most things with 
Mother M's name on them.  Mother M loves fully-integrated "buy the whole 
thing and service contracts for the rest of your life" type systems... 
Trango seems more the "here's the pieces to build something cool... 
we'll help, but it's your network" kind of folks.  Both have a place in 
the world.  Both businesses seem to be doing well, but Mesa's going to 
be paying off their radio gear a for lot longer than Wispertel, I 
think.  Just my opinion, looking at retail prices and guessing about 
what each gets for discounts from distributors.

"Little things" make a big difference with the customer's experience 
when operating on a wireless network, and these guys pay attention to 
detail.  Stuff like properly grounding antennas, and things that the 
"data geeks turned RF guy" type shops didn't even know were going to 
bite them you-know-where later on.  An example was when we mentioned we 
were putting our Antenna/Access Point on a communications tower, the 
Wispertel folks knew without question that their system would have to be 
integrated into the mountaintop site's tower ground and lighting 
protection system.  They pointed out that (ironically) Motorola makes a 
grounding device for the Canopy gear that does exactly this, and helped 
us find a source of the device, which we integrated with our Polyphaser 
panel and site lighting protection the week after we installed the gear.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend Wispertel to anyone.

Nate