Originally posted in the UBNT forum,
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community.ubnt.com/t5/Bu ··· p/862140Three concepts covered here....
#1 - For years i have been saying not to go up against the urban wired incumbents. But things have changed. The slowest speed 756 Kbps DSL is $55 per month after the one year promotion, cable rates keep going up, and DSL improvments have stagnated to force users to costly cellular wireless plans.
#2 - Most WISP operators follow an organic growth model. Build out a little, let it start making money, build out some more. This leaves large areas of potential revenue untouched, and it leaves areas open to your competition. Furthermore they usually just throw up an AP and hope for the best in terms of coverage, subscriber uptake, interference, and spectrum planning.
#3 - I have eschewed rural deployments in favor of small town light urban communities to compete in terms of lower cost and higher speed, and be happy with only 15 to 20 per cent of the total market. My projects have a goal to meet at least $400K net per year starting 5Q of operation with over 1,000 subscribers - this is an entirely reasonable and achievable business model where I look for towns with at least 12,000 population.
Doing the math:
12,000 population = 4,800 households
4,800 households x 20% uptake = close to 1,000 potential subscribers
1,000 subscribers x $35 per month = $35,000 per month
$35,000 per month = $420,000 per year starting before 5Q
Where you shotgun in your entire infrastructure before advertising service
The secret of achieving this is complex and thorough planning.
Below are two Radio Mobile pictures and an aerial picture.
The first shows the projected 1.5 mile radius of a 360° of a tower site for a -60 dBm end-point signal level using U-NII-2 "DFS" channels of 30 dBm EIRP for both AP and clients. I specify 40 foot tall masts and take advantage of higher points of terrain.
The orange grids are .6 (6/10th) nautical miles tall. The red dots are verified house locations. The black numbers are 20% of the number of houses (red dots) in each square grid area.
Rose = a client location where only one AP site can be seen.
Orange = two APs seen
Yellow = three. I consider this to be adequate to overcome trees by pointing in different directions at each subscriber's house location.
The first picture above - overlapping_coverage.png
Next I apply the sector coverage for each AP location and start figuring how many APs I need to serve the number of subscribers within the footprint, where I limit each AP radio to 30 to 35 subscribers.
The middle picture above - overlapping_sectors.png
The third picture above - aerial_sites.png
WHT = Short Form Acronym for "You couldn't handle me even if I came with instructions!"
Well engineered projects are indistinguishable from crazy ideas.
Speed, distance, reliability, cost...Pick three.
...World's First Ubiquiti AirMax WISP....