For us it's mostly time and money. Which in the end means money. The gear is affordable. It's working well these days. Reliability is, over all, way up from 5 or 6 years ago.
We could expand into more areas, but the costs to get INTO them are too high for the number of customers there. Most of our competition is doing a pretty good job, expanding into those areas would cost too much over the long run. Right now small amounts of money are fairly easy to come by. But with the stimulus crap going on I'm going nice and slow till I know what other money will be put into areas around me. One of the hardest things to deal with right now is spectrum. 2.4 is TRASHED. We're functional, but it's a lot more work to keep things running well than it should be. I could start moving more things to 5.x but I'm afraid I'll end up with the exact same mess there in a few years if I use the cheap wifi based stuff. shrug. At least we're moving more and more of the backhaul over. It's pretty amazing how much of a difference that's making in performance and manageability. We're also in the final planning stages of switching the network over to routed AP's. We're working on authentication mechanisms so we can do static DHCP. One thing that you as manufacturers do that makes my life harder is proprietary systems. The offer better customer retention etc. We often have better performance out of the gear. But I look at what Trango just did. We don't have much of their ptmp gear out, but we don't dare even try to put more. Now I'm overbuilding where that gear used to be so we can run someone else's system. It's hard to put products. The long term viability of the company is a factor. Much more so for ptmp systems that are not standards based. Know what would be the best thing anyone could do? You guys build a GREAT WISP centric protocol and then release it to everyone else. Better yet, everyone get together and use the best of everyone's systems. I'll bet WISPA would be happy to coordinate the effort like we did for our CALEA system. Stop waiting on the IEEE. They have gotten too big and burecratic to act in a timely fashion. We should have had Wi-MAX done a very very long time ago. By pass them, just like we all bypassed the telco to bring broadband to our communities. marlon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Leary" <ple...@apertonet.com> To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 8:37 AM Subject: [WISPA] Barriers to WISP growth > > Regardless of your tech choice -- Moto, 802.11-based, WiMAX or other, I > am interested to know what are the greatest barriers to growth and why? > > Some possibilities: > Is it funding and if so, are your normal channels for money frozen or > otherwise gone? > Is it competition? If so, how specifically. > Are you constrained from hiring due to high cost of employee benefits > (e.g. health insurance)? > Are you stalled waiting for response from your stimulus application? > Are you stalled trying to defend against someone else's stimulus > application that would include your market? > Are the current technologies too expensive or technicall inadequate to > deliver what you need to compete? > > Patrick Leary > Aperto Networks > 813.426.4230 mobile > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
