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Should I use "Over the Counter" gear? |
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Written by Start a WISP Site Admin
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Monday, 10 January 2005 |
"If you wanted to start a WISP from "over the counter" equipment, what
would you use? Stuff you could buy at Best buy or Wal-Mart. You can use
high gain antennas and stuff, but the APs and CPEs had to be
NON-commercial."
Several participants responded with a wide variety of answers including:
"Nothing." - from flaughs2000
Dorian:
Since "nothing" has already been answered (which would have been my answer)...
Your best bet for TRULY starting a WISP and not just frankenstein Linksys or other 802.11b indoor gear:
- Smartbridges
- Motorola Canopy 2.4
- Tranzeo
Personally
I don't know any of them well...imagine we would hate them...but we
aren't trying to do what is sounds (?) like you are trying to do.
Actually, now that I read what you wrote...I have no idea what you are trying to do.
cmaenginsb:
You're not going to find much support in here for over the counter equipment.
The soho gear you get at Best Buy et al just is not robust enough to handle living in an outdoor enclosure.
Personally
we've tried customer bridges from Linksys and Dlink and APs from
Linksys and could only recommend them for home users. The little money
you save on the cheaper equipment is going to be burned up by your or a
techs time servicing the equipment as it tends to go bad 10x more
frequently than the "real" stuff.
I'm not even sure it's worth
it because there places where you can get an outdoor bridge/AP for $150
compared to around $80 for a Linksys or Dlink indoor bridge. Now you
have to spend money on a box for it $15-20, you need some kind of POE
solution (most of which are $30) and then finally you need a pigtail to
connect to the antenna ($20) throw in the time to assemble this and
you're looking at a marginal savings.
Of course this speaks nothing of the legal issues of using antenna tyes that aren't certified with the equipment.
One of our competitors started using over the shelf equipment.
Specifically
Belkin, Linksys WET-11 and other soho APs. Because the radios are so
crappy they had to use amps which basically increased the cost beyond
what a WISP level AP is.
1 year later after losing 3/4 of their customers they are switching everything to Trango.
bito:
I concur. "Back in the day" the linky gear used to cost about half or a
quarter of the other choices out there, but that's not really the case
anymore. When there is plent of great CPEs out there for $150 list,
it's hard to justify doing everything the "old" way.
I was
thinking maybe it was a purchasing issue (can only buy locally), but if
you are buying the antennas and whatnot then why don't you also buy the
radios from them as well? And the support helps a lot too. Linky won't
support your outdoor network 
Original thread location
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Just Starting Out?