Wireless Community Broadband – A how to – The Ultimate Guide

PogMoThoin · 25-06-2012 9:57pm

Change your region to USA, problem solved

greenpilot · 17-07-2012 5:29pm

Hi, is this new broadband available in mayo, I live on a hill between Newport, Westport and castlebar with a great big empty field beside me....plus I'm sick of my current provider. Very slow at times. Vids keep buffering etc.

PogMoThoin · 17-07-2012 5:37pm

greenpilot wrote: »

Hi, is this new broadband available in mayo, I live on a hill between Newport, Westport and castlebar with a great big empty field beside me....plus I'm sick of my current provider. Very slow at times. Vids keep buffering etc.

If you even read the thread, the second line of the opening post says they are in Co. Waterford, so No.

Big Lar · 26-09-2012 5:36pm

Just a quick note to let everyone know how we are going,

The summer was relativity quite and we had a few installs, no big outages thanks be to god. Currently have 39 users on our little network, We are quite capable of expanding into other areas in West Waterford but we just need people to come in under our umbrella and take ownership of those areas. Given that its a not for profit scheme it would be unfair to ask only a few to share the load, the more that can share the burden the easier the scheme gets to run.

Last week we installed another Access Point (90Deg Sector) on high ground to cover about 20 or 30 more houses within our existing area and we hope this will bring in more customers so our monthly income is fast approaching the €1k mark. As well as that with this new access point we will be creating a wireless mesh which will provide redundancy for our internal back haul should any node go down.

Money wise in about another month the scheme will be debt free and will start making a few bucks for itself over the coming months, with this monies we do a few upgrades to our network like UPS's and the like and then we can start thinking about getting more bandwidth.

Going forward personally I would like to get 30mbs upwards bandwidth to our little rural community, but its not going to happen overnight however if we keep going as good as we are we should easily be there in the next six months or so.

All in all looking back from the conceptual stage to the break even stage will be about 11 months so the scheme could be seen as a resounding success and well worth the effort.

zg3409 · 29-09-2012 5:40pm

Hi Lars,

Just reading this thread for the first time. I see you have interference and channel problems. I would recommend reading this:
http://www.comreg.ie/licensing_and_services/5_8_ghz_registration.683.ghzlic.html

This says you can use:
Operating Frequency Band: 5725 – 5875MHz;
Maximum permitted radiated power: 100mW/MHz eirp (to a maximum of 2W eirp);
Registration of operational base stations.

However there is no cost as it's still basically licence exempt. You need to set the "country" in the ubiquity software to "regulatory compliance" and you get all frequencies. If this setting is not there then use the latest firmware.

The aim of the base station registration is so you can work with other providers to reduce interference.

The good thing is home wifi and laptops etc do not use these channels so ideal for outdoor links. They should be relatively quiet.

Hope this helps. I was involved in a similar community wireless a few years ago and I know there is similar system on the Aaran Island etc.

Big Lar · 29-09-2012 9:12pm

Thanks for the info zg3409, that'll come in very handy

Big Lar · 24-04-2013 10:53pm

Well, it’s been a while so a little update.
Were still alive down here and tipping away nicely, we now have 51 users on our little network and despite my last post back in September its only now we are the break even stage, we decided to upgrade a few of our links and installed UPS’s at all our AP’s just to have the little bit of redundancy.

Over the last three months we have had around 0.22% of downtime so we are pretty chuffed with that, despite having installed UPS’s the high winds there about a week ago knocked out power to two of our AP’s and they were out for 18 -24 hours but there was nothing we could do about that. We were able to text the few users on the AP’s and they were understanding enough.

We do get a few enquiries for service in the local village and surrounding areas but we have full time jobs ourselves and cannot commit the time and effort to get them and keep them up and running so we are waiting for those communities to get up of their arse's motivated and organise a few volunteers themselves.

We have been able to do a few nice things for the community with our network, the local school was on a satellite link for internet that peaked at around 100kb which was just pure sad in this day and age, so we installed a link and have decided not to charge the school at all for the service as they are using the bandwidth at off peak times so it’s no additional load on our network. Also we have sponsored a set of running kit for the school They better win something now with the new gear or we will be taking them back

iPhone. · 03-07-2013 8:52pm

Just read through all this thread from start to finish and don't know how I missed it before.

But I have to say I am mightily impressed by Big Lar and his community in what they have achieved. Totally inspiring lads, fair fekin play to the lot of ye!

Hope it doesn't bug anyone that I have pulled the thread back up to the main page as it has been a while since the last post but I just had to congratulate them on their achievements, and in any case this is the kind of story that should be on every community forum front page, keep us up to date now and then Big Lar when you can spare the time.

Big Lar · 03-07-2013 9:23pm

Thanks Iphone,

Nothing much has changed since the last post, Zenith and I have connected another two users to bring us up to 53. We had a bad enough month in June with nearly 36 hours of downtime, some of it on our network with equipment issues and some of it outside our network, but all seems to be up and running again with the last three weeks so we are back to condition green.

We finally bought the Butch Evans script that Big Paddy told us about in his post in Dec 2011 (We work pretty fast round here) and Zenith is working on that as we speak, so we should be ready to deploy that shortly.

Our network was built to suit our budget so now that we have a few bucks in the kitty we intend to upgrade a few back haul links over the summer to make room for more traffic on the network as we hope upping our speeds on the network.

We have a Facebook page since the last two weeks with a whooping 18 likes :eek:

ED E · 13-02-2014 3:08am

Cracking stuff Big Lar. You're a champ.

Out of interest, any known plans for a VDSL cab anywhere near the area? If you could negotiate with Eircom to get a feed on from one the potential for increased bandwidth could be huge.

bk · 13-02-2014 10:16am

I was thinking the same, plus it would help improve reliability of the backhaul greatly (going from long distance wireless backhaul) to a fibre link.

Reading their facebook page, they seem to understandably suffer a lot of issues with their wireless backhaul going down due to all the storms down to Cork.

I think this is one area where I think the government mandate that Eircom and the ESB give reasonable fibre access to wireless schemes like this.

Nonoperational · 13-02-2014 6:06pm

Great read. Getting fibre or even VDSL backhaul to these community WISPS would appear to be a no brainer. Hope it continues to work out.

Big Lar · 14-02-2014 12:05am

ED E wrote: »

Cracking stuff Big Lar. You're a champ.

Thanks Ed but there is more than me involved.

Yes we have been suffering with the wind a bit these days but we seem to be struggling on, only but for the storms everything would be going swimmingly, February has been our worst month ever as we are only up 90% of the time but that's one 22hr outage yesterday and an 8 hour outage last week so considering that we are well ahead of a lot of other broadband providers out there.

Money is the solution to all our problems, with money we can get a more reliable network infrastructure, we have connected a good few folk over the past couple of months and the balance is starting to grow, with this we can invest in a more reliable network infrastructure.

With regards to the fibre its a good bit away time wise and I don't know if we would be prepared to move providers at this stage as we have a nice relationship built up.

trompele · 14-02-2014 8:54pm

Hi Big Lar,
Im impressed by you achievment, im looking to work on simillar project. Can you tell me where are you getting you bandwidth from?

Nonoperational · 14-02-2014 9:20pm

In the first few pages he says he gets it from a local WISP.

Big Lar · 15-02-2014 1:31pm

trompele wrote: »

Hi Big Lar,
Im impressed by you achievment, im looking to work on simillar project. Can you tell me where are you getting you bandwidth from?

Drop me a pm and I'll help you if I can

Some_Person · 15-02-2014 9:53pm

trompele wrote: »

Hi Big Lar,
Im impressed by you achievment, im looking to work on simillar project. Can you tell me where are you getting you bandwidth from?

Unless outside their coverage areas, you're going to have a very hard time competing with Carnsore Broadband and SkyTel/Rocket Broadband, they do very high speeds and are already on the premier high sites like Forth Mountain, Whitemountain and Mayglass WT.

trompele · 16-02-2014 10:51am

hi,
Carnsore is not available here, skytel has terrible support and packages offered are not reflecting what you get (18 mbit package give you 8mbit).
I will probably do this on much smaller scale.
PLanning to sign up 20-30 people that are living in my estate. I'm currently checking where i could get good deal on bandwidth.

Black People · 21-02-2014 1:45am

How many customers do you have now and do you have any Speedtest results you could should us?

Big Lar · 21-02-2014 6:14pm

Black People wrote: »

How many customers do you have now and do you have any Speedtest results you could should us?

Around 70 subscribers
With regards to the speed tests, you can have a peep at our daily usage here http://www.wwcbb.net/?page_id=166

Black People · 22-02-2014 2:07am

What's the speed limit with fixed wireless? There's a guy on the ESB thread advocating that the government should subsidise fiber optic broadband for farmers because fixed wireless isn't enough. I also see in Australia, a company offers 25/5 - which is above average by Ireland's standards, although, the upload speed is below average for here.

Big Lar · 22-02-2014 9:54pm

NO straight answer to that one I'm afraid, depends on how much money you spend. Ubiquiti the crowd we buy the gear from boast a piece of kit that can push 1.4Gbs over a link of 13km but that's a perfect scenario with no noise and perfect weather conditions and the cost would be about €3k just for one link.

We use domestic gear and the max theoretical speed is 150Mbs in perfect conditions once again. We use narrow channels on our system as there is a lot of traffic in the area so this reduces the amount of noise (unwanted signal interference) but by halving our channel width we also half the theoretical speed to a max of 75Mbs if you follow.

Distance to access points are also to be taken into consideration so in saying all that and if we had the bandwidth available to us we could probably guarantee all our subscribers a minimum of 8Mbs with the ones closest to the access points perhaps 50ish Mbs, don't know for definite as we have never pushed that much across our network.

Black People · 23-02-2014 4:54pm

What's your current maximum upload speed?

Big Lar · 23-02-2014 8:21pm

Black People wrote: »

What's your current maximum upload speed?

I have been wanting to ask this question since your first post, what's you interest in this ?

Black People · 23-02-2014 8:36pm

Big Lar wrote: »

I have been wanting to ask this question since your first post, what's you interest in this ?

I'm just asking as a broadband/internet enthusiast. I dying to get faster upload speeds myself but I'm stuck on ADSL.2+, which only gives me 0.56Mb.

Villain · 23-02-2014 9:38pm

The upload and download speeds can be the same, the ratio of upload to download is something that only really affects DSL, with connectivity to any major provider a WISP can provide synchronous links e.g. I have 7mb/7mb, there are limits and if the antenna strengths are different you won't always get synchronous speeds on clients.

Bir Lar have you used any PowerBridges over links of 20km ? If so what kind of results were you seeing?

Big Lar · 23-02-2014 10:34pm

Black People wrote: »

I'm just asking as a broadband/internet enthusiast. I dying to get faster upload speeds myself but I'm stuck on ADSL.2+, which only gives me 0.56Mb.

As Villian says we have a symmetrical link so its the same up as down but dependant on a lot of things, we offer our subscribers .5 & 1Mb upload and the reason that we limit the upload is so that we have room for download, while all links are symmetrical large uploading would restrict the downloads over time.

Big Lar · 23-02-2014 10:42pm

Villain wrote: »

Bir Lar have you used any PowerBridges over links of 20km ? If so what kind of results were you seeing?

The longest link we have is 16Km which had a 30Dbi rocket on one side and a 25Dbi Nanobridge on the other, we have one Powerbridge and the only reason that its there is for aesthetic purposes, a 25Dbi Nanobridge should do the same thing. Them feckin Nanobridges are over €200.00 versus a nanobridge for around €85.00.

I wouldn't mind trying one of those 25Dbi Nanobeam's to be honest, perhaps have a look at two of those for your 20km link, or you could check out the 30Dbi rocket dish.

edanto · 07-06-2014 3:41pm

Just wanted to add my 2c to congratulate you all on the project, it's an impressive achievement to have started so quickly and be running well for the past 2 1/2 years.

How are you finding the challenges of customer support and co-ordinating volunteers?

Technically, how are you providing the failover link into the mesh, if you don't mind talking about it? I've used a router with failover WAN, but in an office scenario where you have the two WAN links arriving to the same place!

I guess it might be different in your setup, can you feed another WAN into the Ubiquiti gear at a different point to the main link and have them use it for seamless failover if the main link goes down? Or is it set up with a standard WAN failover router at the point of entry of the 2 WANs?

Just trying to riddle out how you might have set it up! No bother if you'd rather keep those discussions in-house.

Big Lar · 14-06-2014 4:45pm

Soz for the late reply Edanto, was on holidays.
Before you ask, I had a nice time thanks.

How are you finding the challenges of customer support and co-ordinating volunteers?

Ah we don't get much grief from the customers, perhaps a phone call a month or so. Its good actually to get the calls as then you are aware of a problem on the network.

Volunteers, we have had a few offers but one does need a bit of technical know how and those folks are few and far between, we have roped in a local electrician and we pay him a few bucks to install the equipment so we have added a few bucks onto the install fee to cover this.

how are you providing the failover link into the mesh

We use a mikrotik router for failover with two outgoing routes where we manually have to throw the switch (Disable a route) but we has a few folks in area that would normally be at home trained how to change over, we know if the link is down by using a service like pingdom.com so as we have all the ubiquiti gear gateways pointed at the router then the router is the only thing that needs changing. There is probably a more fancier way of doing it but this seems to work for us.
Routing is not my thing so I cannot give a more precise answer, its something like this thou http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=71752

AlanS181824 · 16-06-2014 4:54pm

Been following this from the start and wow, amazing!

Kudos to you and all those involved.

You were fed up of the broadband in your area so you done something about it!

I have 100/20 Fibre broadband but if I lived in a rural area I'd like to think that there'd be something like what you offer around.

Kudos

Fatal Except1on · 23-06-2014 4:06pm

Just read the thread, impressive stuff and well done!

JabbaTheHut · 24-07-2014 9:09pm

Nice going there, Big Lar. Sounds like a lot of work , but well worth it.

Are far as the 5ghz frequency in your links, you had to register with Comreg, right? Was it just a case of filling up the form online, or did you have to wait for Comreg to get back to you allowing you use the 5ghz?

ED E · 17-10-2017 7:02pm

Ophelia made a right job of our transmitter in Grange, not to worry thou folks we have the Deaglan Moloney and his crack team lined up for first thing tomorrow to put things right. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Great work from Big Lar in keeping his flock on their social media taps.

Wireless Community Broadband – A how to – The Ultimate Guide

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