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A good wisp can be competitive vs starlink. The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often
by protocolture 3y ago
A good wisp can be competitive vs starlink.
The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik).
Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested.
A wisp operator can:
1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz.
2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO.
3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density
4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options.
5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt.
What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.
- _huayra_ 3y ago> Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik Why this association? At least on the consumer side, I've really enjoyed using Mikrotik's stuff for my homelab. Is it just a sign of "someone not wanting to pony up for Real Networking Gear" or something similar?
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoI love Mikrotik but it kinda checks out. They're a high grade consumer/light commercial vendor more than utility scale commercial grade. I'd use them if I was trying to setup internet for my street or a small-medium sized office but not for my whole neighborhood. Their remote management utilities and software updates are good but not enough to keep me from having to ever get physical access to everything.
- donw 3y agoWho would you go with?
- wil421 3y agoUbiquiti can provide everything on his list for wireless. They also sell OLTs and CPE devices if you want to build a smaller fiber network. If you want real telco stuff look at Edge core or Nokia.
- milankragujevic 3y agoUbiquiti’s hardware is limited in some respects whereby with Mikrotik you can implement anything, its just a matter of how and the performance. Ubiquiti for core, especially when deploying CGNAT, is a bad idea.
- _huayra_ 3y agoIs there something similar to Ubiquiti's "unified configuration" thing (where you can configure your whole network in a coherent way, maybe even from some gui)? I love my Mikrotik homelab setup, but it's held together by carefully crafted per-box configs that are not easy to change all together (e.g. adding another VLAN, etc). Maybe it's just my newbie status at this, but hopefully there's some cool piece of software that I just don't know about yet!
- milankragujevic 3y agoMikroTik is actually mostly configured via a GUI. It's pretty rare to use CLI except to automate stuff. However, there is only a limited "Quick Settings" option, which supports most basic configurations. For anything more advanced, you do actually have to set it up yourself. However, the problem with recommending Ubiquiti in the context of an ISP, is that once you hit a wall with it, you are done. You cannot change things that are not supported to be changed, you cannot make it do something it was not "designed" to do. On Ubiquiti, you can ssh into the VyOS-derived OS on the EdgeRouter (if talking about EdgeOS), but anything you do there cannot be accessed from the webui anymore, and changing anything in the webui will of course destroy what you changed manually over SSH. At that point, you have an offbrand Linux router that is hindering you, and you either go with MikroTik or upgrade to Cisco equipment. But that Ubiquiti is going on a shelf. In general, it's quite different running an ISP and running a homelab. With MikroTik, you can make ANYTHING and everything. And there is no paywall for additional features like some vendors. Finally, to underline my point, it is required to learn MikroTik's RouterOS before starting an ISP, if you don't want to end up with problems.
- protocolture 3y agoWeird I thought I answered this. Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night. ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6. MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table. Theres other issues too. I could really go all day. Great homelab stuff. I use it too.
- _huayra_ 3y agoIf one were to go from a bigger scale from a home lab to, say, wiring up all the units in my condo building to share the same internet connection somehow (or maybe a multi-AP wifi setup in a small business like a climbing gym), what would you go with equipment wise? I'm guessing not Cisco because the license costs?
- RajT88 3y agoI worked at such a place from 2003 - 2005. Mostly right, but the boss hired pretty smart people fresh out of college (cheap). They are still around and their website still sucks. Last I heard they were doing fine.
- somat 3y agoA website that sort of sucks is one of my business legitimacy tests. But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.
- RajT88 3y agoThe former for sure
- protocolture 3y agoOne of my former employers maintains an old shitty wordpress site just to plant a flag. They never used it. All their customers come from referrals.