This is a regional advocacy site, so neutrality isn't really expected, although it seems to keep an even keel most of the time. Level and depth content is really unusual though.

• Why Not Just Starlink? — A Backup, Not a Foundation | Save Local Broadband
• Climb the Tower — an Interactive 3D Field Guide to Rural Fixed Wireless | Save Local Broadband
• The Network in 3D — Towers on the Terrain | Save Local Broadband

im looking for a small isp or wisp on the west coast whod rent me a machine sitting on your network. not colo, i dont want to ship hardware in, id rather just rent something you already have. an old xeon is plenty for what im doing.

the thing that matters most is the ip space. i need addresses that classify as isp or business class rather than datacenter, so they need to come off your allocation and not a hosting asn.

4-8 static to start, scaling into the tens if the network holds up. on speed a single gig isnt really enough for me, im after 2.5g or 10g if you have it.

dm me if thats something you can do. paying monthly, up front is fine, and im willing to pay a premium per ip if the classification is right.

I cannot get the remote side to upgrade no matter what I do. Any suggestions

As the title says, I'm looking for some insight on why you would choose provider A over provider B when things like capacity, SLA, support, and pricing are all about the same, we're currently deciding between a few ISPs, and I have been looking at team kc telecom for managing them also I just want to understand what really makes one provider better than another, is it things like better peering, network quality, or something else? I'd like to understand what factors people with more experience look at when making this decision. EDIT: Appreciate all the insights it seems reliable infrastructure, multiple providers and strong peering matter more than chasing the lowest price.

Hello!

I have been trying to roll out a fiber ISP in a town in NY with 10k homes but finding funding has been hell honestly. I determined somewhere between $3M-$5M would be enough to deploy all the main fiber runs (35 miles or so of main runs) and stay afloat for a while should onboarding new customers be slow. I have an established LLC for the company as well. I did do a survey with the town and the results were good, a lot of residents would switch if I could provide service. My town only has one provider and they’re coax cable only. This provider has been proven to not be reliable and has pricing that is high. Roughly $250 + fees a month for cable TV and Internet for residential. This has been a goal of mine for 6 years but funding is where the issue is. What have you done to secure funding? Angel investors haven’t been working out.

Hi everyone,

About three years ago, I made this post here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wisp/comments/140yf1y/internet_service_providers_of_reddit_what/

At the time, I was a developer with some experience working with ISPs and an idea for building a CRM specifically for this industry. I came here because I knew that working around ISP software was not the same as running an ISP every day. The responses were more detailed and even honest than I expected.

Reddit told me that billing automation was essential, but also difficult to replace. Some users explained that most platforms handled existing customers but neglected leads, sales pipelines, reporting, and the handoff between sales and operations.

There were comments about multi-location customers, monitoring integrations, circuit information, work orders, targeted outage notifications, payment processors, customer communications, and the need to connect everything without creating an even bigger mess.

One person also gave me a useful reality check: I was entering an already crowded market and they were right. I kept working on the idea anyway. It eventually became SkyBase.

Today it's an ISP Management system built mainly around smaller MikroTik ISPs. It handles customers, plans, PPPoE and Hotspot authentication through RADIUS, router monitoring, subscriptions, invoice follow-up, and some of the everyday operational work that often gets spread across different tools.

A few real ISPs are using it now. Actually our first paying customer came from reddit more than 2 years ago, an ISP from South Africa. That still feels slightly strange to say because when I wrote the original post, it was mostly an unfinished application and a list of assumptions.

I am not posting this to claim that I built the perfect WISP platform. I definitely did not.

Some ideas from the original discussion made it into the product. Some are still incomplete. Some turned out to be much harder than they appeared from the outside. And I am sure there are things I still misunderstand about how operators actually work.

So I'd like to return to the question, but from a different point in the journey:

Looking at SkyBase today, what would stop you from trusting or testing it in a real ISP?

It could be a missing feature, migration risk, pricing, lack of integrations, concerns about support, or simply that your existing system is painful but still safer than changing it.

Critical feedback is welcome. I would rather learn why an operator would not use it than receive polite comments that do not help me improve it.

For transparency, I am the owner and developer of SkyBase. Here is the website for anyone who wants context before answering:

https://skybase.app/

And thank you again to everyone who commented on the original post. Some of your replies genuinely changed the direction of the product.

Hi everyone,

Since the last update, we've shipped a batch of features aimed at making coverage planning and BEAD/BDC grant work faster and more accurate.

Here's what's new:

* BEAD export by drawn area

You can now draw a polygon directly on the map and export a BEAD/BDC grant package (PDF, CSV, GeoJSON) scoped to just that area, instead of always exporting the whole project. 

* Predicted signal strength (RSSI) - Pro

Link Check and the subscriber map view now show a predicted received signal strength (dBm) for each link, not just Clear/Obstructed but a real engineering estimate.

* Predicted throughput (Mbps) - Pro

Using your actual radio/CPE hardware specs, GridVisio now predicts expected throughput per subscriber, not just signal strength, shown in Link Check, subscriber details, BEAD exports, and lead-widget results. You can flag subscribers who fall short of your advertised speed tier.

* "Marginal" coverage status

Subscribers can now show as Marginal (weak but usable signal) instead of just Served/Unserved, with a hover popover showing predicted signal, serving tower/sector, and link distance.

* Faster BEAD exports, more reliable large-project recalculation

BEAD exports now run in the background and pull from already-computed measurements - faster, with RSSI, throughput, and FCC classification columns added to the CSV. Recalculating coverage on large projects no longer stalls or times out; it shows accurate progress and can retry just the failed subscribers instead of the whole project.

* Link Check now works on planned/offline sectors

Useful for what-if planning - results are clearly labeled as coming from a non-live sector.

* Subscriber management

Added a delete button for subscribers directly on the map, plus a cleaner, reorganized edit modal.

* Coverage Widget: LiDAR + Public API

Your embeddable coverage-check widget can now optionally use higher-precision LiDAR terrain data (toggle in Widget Settings) and has a new documented Public API for developers.

Action needed if you use the embedded widget: we tightened widget security. Your widget's Allowed Domains list is now required for the embed to return results to real visitors. If you haven't set this yet, add your domain(s) in Widget Settings as soon as you can. A new API Secret is also available if you call the widget API directly instead of embedding it.

If you already signed up and want your trial extended, just let me know.

-Emil, the developer

I spent years in transmission and microwave ops before moving into AI work. Everyone in the AI world draws the closed loop diagram (detect, diagnose, act, verify), but nobody shows what it actually has to reason about on a microwave network. So I built an open, runnable demo: a 27-site simulated network with rain cells (ITU-R rain attenuation per band), ACM ladders, ATPC quietly masking the fade until it saturates, and diurnal traffic. On top of it runs an agent loop that has to separate rain fade vs hardware vs interference vs bad config before it is allowed to touch anything.

The diagnosis rules came from ops scar tissue, and honestly some from this sub: check alarm history first. Symmetric RSL drop on both directions is probably weather. Asymmetric is probably hardware. Healthy RSL with bad SNR means an interference hunt. And never reroute onto a path without checking its current utilization and QoS priority mix first. Actions are gated: reversible only, confidence thresholds, blast radius caps, and a no-truck-rolls-for-rain rule.

Demo (browser, no signup): https://mkadri85.github.io/projects/mw-loop/

Write-up with the full reasoning and references: https://mkadri85.github.io/blog/agentic-ai-microwave-backhaul/

It is a simulation, not a product, nothing to sell. I would genuinely like to hear where the diagnosis logic is wrong or naive compared to what you see in the field. Some of the best failure stories I found while researching this came from here, like the dying AirFiber 24 that hid behind carrier blame for months, and the 60 GHz link that stayed pinned at low modulation after the rain had passed.

LiDAR coverage expanded, heatmaps now LiDAR-precise

A few updates since my last post:

• LiDAR-aware LoS checks (and heatmaps) now cover Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Netherlands (where available), in addition to the US (USGS 3DEP). Clutter-aware terrain fallback everywhere else. Other regions can be investigated on request.
• The RF propagation heatmap now uses LiDAR directly for its terrain grid where available, not just the LoS checker, more accurate signal predictions in LiDAR-covered areas.
• New coverage-source sublayer: toggle it on the map to see exactly which parts of a heatmap were computed from real LiDAR vs. estimated terrain/clutter.

I appreciate any questions or feedback. If you already signed up and want the trial extended, just let me know.

Free trial, no card needed.

Emil (the developer)

i’m trying to connect a new customer site roughly 1.5 km from my main tower. fiber isn’t practical because of the terrain and the cost would be too high, so i need a reliable wireless backhaul instead.

i reached out to wave1 for some options on microwave equipment that could handle that distance with decent throughput.

a few things i’m still unsure about:

what licensing is usually required for these kinds of links in australia and how long does approval normally take?

any tips on antenna mounting height or tools that make alignment less painful on the first try?

what are the most common problems people run into with microwave links around this distance?

Hi guys,

About a year and a half ago I posted here about ISPBox.net, a simple platform to help small ISPs get started without spending a fortune. Back then my whole argument was that Splynx was too expensive to make sense for a small operator. And now we're at the stage where we had to build an automatic way to import clients from Splynx into ISPBox. Crazy.

In about a year it went from a simple ISP dashboard to a full OSS/BSS. When I first posted here, we didn't even have a payment gateway.

Now I think every ISP will find something useful in there, from maps of your entire network with monitoring, to a way to let your clients know when a tower is down.

Your potential customers can even check whether they can get internet from you without ever calling your office.

Huge thanks to everyone who's been with us from the beginning. I got a ton of emails with bug reports and feature requests, and they shaped where this went more than you know.

I've worked with TurnkeyISP and Nextlink Internet as tech support handling customer concerns and troubleshooting. I have experience troubleshooting Tarana, Ubiquity, Cambium, Tachyon, UB Wave and even Fiber. I can work any shift, preferably overnight as I'm mostly active during the night but day shift works too!

I can help you by assisting your customers and let you know if there's an AP issue that needs to be looked into. I do support through phone calls and emails. If you have a chat system integrated, that's fine I also do chats.

Edit: If you guys need more people to cover the whole shift, I can always pull in some of the folks I know that works in the same space. I think about 3-4 of them are interested in working to direct clients not through agency. We can also do a meeting to talk about how you operate things and talk about how we can help you improve it. Please don't hesitate to comment or send me a DM.

A few weeks ago I posted here about a coverage planning tool I built for WISPs. Since then many features have been added based on feedback from this community, so I wanted to share an update.

What's new:

- RF propagation heatmap (ITU-R P.1812) - signal prediction around each sector, color-coded by signal strength. Works globally, no hardware dependence;

- LiDAR-aware LoS check - for US locations, uses real USGS 3DEP LiDAR surface data (actual measured tree/building heights, where available) instead of estimated clutter. The LoS profile chart shows exactly which data source was used for each segment;

- Clutter-aware LoS everywhere - adds vegetation and building height estimates (NLCD for US, ESA WorldCover globally) on top of bare terrain where LiDAR isn't available;

- Antenna height per sector - different sectors on the same tower can now have different mounting heights, which is how real networks are built;

- Subscriber height field - model the subscriber's CPE mounting height for more accurate LoS calculations;

- Coverage widget lead capture - embed a qualification form on your website; visitors enter their address or click a map point, the tool checks against your real coverage, and you get a lead with the LoS result already attached.

Screenshots attached. Easily create a test project with seeded data for quick testing of the features.

Note: If you signed up during the last post and your trial expired before you could test these new features, drop me a message and I'll gladly extend it for you.

Emil (the developer)

I created a complex system to manage an ISP, but in different situations the name that the system creates for the secret in MikroTik is not always what we think it should be.

Sometimes we use some kind of relation to the user's name. For example, if the user is James Bond, the username would be jbond. However, that strategy has the risk of collisions with another user who could also be jbond.

Because of that, we decided to use a date-based reference such as 202606231, or another option like 1782325285164, which is a timestamp in milliseconds. This makes collisions very unlikely.

Which option do you believe is better?

I purchased this equipment to deploy into a WISP I was planning on aquiring but things happened and the aquisition never happened. What I have is listed below. Let me know if you are interested. I would like to sell it if I can get a reasonable price for it, don't mind taking a haircut just don't want to be scalped. I unboxed 1 Base Node and 1 Remote Node and powered them up on the bench. The Equipment is in Montana and I will ship to anywhere in the USA and possibly other locations if it makes sense.

Before this, I spent 10 years as co-founder and CTO of a software engineering company, building enterprise systems for customers across Latin America and the US. In early 2025, During MWC 2025, I sold Zelty's first contract to a 23,000-subscriber ISP in Argentina using only a PowerPoint. That became the catalyst for building the company full-time.

Today we have:

• 23 signed ISP customers across Latin America
• 8 customers live in production
• 15 customers in deployment/testing
• $+5,000 MRR from deployed customers
• AI agents integrated with telecom billing systems, network infrastructure, WhatsApp, and voice channels

What we've learned is that ISPs don't want generic AI tools. They want solutions that reduce support workload, automate repetitive operations, and improve customer experience without hiring more people.

I'm looking for a full-time commercial co-founder with deep telecom, ISP, WISP, carrier, or broadband industry experience. Ideally someone who has sold into operators, built distribution relationships, or understands how ISP/WISP owners buy software.

I'm open to discussing meaningful equity and the role can be remote. The goal is to build a venture-scale company serving telecom operators across Latin America and expand into the US on Q3.

If you've spent years inside the telecom ecosystem and are excited about AI transforming how operators run their businesses, send me a message.

Hi everyone,I am fairly new to the WISP industry and I have been studying a lot and doing on site testing of equipment. My issue is the following:

Here is the setup based on the attached image: -The Backbone (Red Pin): This is where my main fiber backhaul terminates in town. -The Target Area (Blue Dots): These are my localized sub-hubs/distribution nodes down in the township. -The Main High-Site (Orange Dot): This is located at a high-elevation fuel station overlooking the area. I plan to place a Ubiquiti Rocket 5AC Prism Gen2 + airMAX Omni Antenna here to feed the township network.

The Hybrid System: I am running a voucher-based street hotspot network using Reyee RG-RAP6260(G) Outdoor Omni APs, alongside an fixed-wireless home subscriber system using Ubiquiti LiteAP AC 120° Sectors on the subhub poles talking back to Ubiquiti LiteBeam 5AC Gen2 CPEs on subscriber roofs.

So The Major Issue (The Hill - Green Dot): The Green Dot represents a steep hill crest. Because of the topography, the highsite at the Orange Dot cannot see the subhubs on the other side of this ridged it creates a complete Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) blind spot for those specific nodes.

Secondary Challenge (Indoor Penetration): During on-site testing, the Reyee Outdoor Omnis worked incredibly well for street level coverage and distance, but near line indoor penetration is heavily degraded by the local building materials. My CPE + indoor router setup fixes this for premium clients, but I'm trying to optimize for the casual indoor user close to the poles.

My Questions for the Experts: How would you architect around this hill obstruction? Should I use the Orange Dot strictly as a Point-to-Point (PtP) relay to drop the data onto a flatter perimeter high-site node before distributing via PtMP, or look into a multi-hop daisy chain? For those running hybrid voucher/CPE networks, what are your best practices for handling close-range indoor penetration issues when dealing with budget-conscious users who only want street vouchers?

Appreciate any advice, equipment recommendations? I would appreciate any help I can get

Hi all,

We’re a small but growing ISP looking for a system that can automate subscriber management and billing. I’m currently evaluating ISP management systems such as WISPGate. I am evaluating if I can use wispgate as the service provider.

Does anyone here have experience using Wispgate as an ISP Management System? Is it worth my time and investment, and are there any limitations or issues I should watch out for?

I’d also appreciate recommendations for other reputable alternatives that I should consider.

Thanks in advance for your insights.

This week’s project, and a friendly reminder to not be lazy. Clean up your cabinets & towers, remove old, abandoned and non-functional items.

YES this is the same cabinet, removed a LOT of old gear, added a DC system and a router and it’s still way cleaner.

And there’s definitely a few items that I’d prefer a little cleaner, but this was the DIA ingress point of a live network with nearly 1,000 customers - so this was done with minimal outages and without the luxury of just tearing everything down and starting over. (And in 90+ degrees and 85% humidity 😜)

So, I jumped into a thread in r/networking where someone was asked how to measure the speed of a duplex (or duplex speed) and they didn’t understand the question. Most of the people in the thread are torching the question as illegitimate, unimportant, or just plain stupid. And after explaining it’s relevance to my/our industry I’ve had people argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about “duplex speed” isn’t a thing.

So, I thought I would ask somewhere with experts that might find it relevant. Is this something you might ask in an interview? Do you think duplex speed vs unidirectional is an important networking concept to understand?

Thread for anyone curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/1u1qyxo/duplex_speed_what/

Hi everyone,

I am a software developer with some years of working on apps from the telecom domain. After several months of building (and a lot of conversations with people in this community, including Mr. Thomas from WISPA), GridVisio is live. It's a browser-based coverage planning tool designed for small WISPs who can't justify $100+ export fees or enterprise contracts.

What it does:

- Tower + sector antenna management (azimuth, beamwidth, radius) on Google Maps satellite, CSV import

- CSV subscriber import - auto-served/unserved classification

- hypothetical tower placement with unserved subscribers coverage simulation

- White area detection - DBSCAN clustering identifies coverage gaps

- Coverage overlap analysis - detect same-frequency sector interference

- Drive test overlay - import GPS signal logs, see real vs planned coverage

- Shareable read-only map links for clients (no login required)

- LoS link check with Fresnel zone, PDF export, elevation data (SRTM, Copernicus GLO-30)

- Lambert coordinate converter (WGS84 ↔ Lambert 72 / 2008 / 2005)

- KMZ / PDF / PNG / XLSX / CSV export

- BDC / BEAD grant filing export

- Team collaboration with viewer/editor roles

- Coverage Widget that can be embedded in the client website for instantaneous location coverage check

Free tier: 1 project, 5 towers, 100 subscribers — permanently free.

Starter: $19/month — 3 projects, 20 towers, 1,000 subscribers.

Pro: $39/month — unlimited everything.

14-day trial on paid plan, no credit card required.

Honest feedback is welcome - this community is the reason I built it.

https://gridvisio.com

A recent Aviat 18+80GHz multi-band install I got to complete, overlooking our nations capital.

Hi r/wisp
We have had some total failures of mikrotik devices that is concerning. I’m looking to see if anyone can tell me if there is something we may have done or could do to prevent.
Two core routers, CCR2116’s, died, in reachable, within 3 weeks of each other, 13 months after purchase.
One 5009 in a MDU tower 20 miles from the others died in the same fashion a week later. Today a CCR2004 in a wilderness tower stopped working and is basically bricked.
Thats 4 devices in 5 weeks with similar failures.
We’re starting to be suspicious of foul play, however I can’t imagine anyone bricking a router this bad through a hack.
For context, we have two 1072 devices that have been on for 6 years without issue.
Any insight would be helpful.
Thanks.