Just an estimate. $99 - RB433 $50 - enclosure $12 - pigtail x3 $50 - R5Hn (oh, that worked out well...) $50 - R52Hn $67 - 12dBi Omni $35 - 9dBi Omni $60 - 29dBi grid $15 - LMR400 $22 - POE $60 - UPS
It was a bit of an experiment, paid off here, not so much elsewhere. 12dBi omni on top for distance, 9dBi omni on bottom to prevent blind spots directly under the tower. SISO signal with MIMO signal correction. This was built quite a while back. I've had to replace the board at least three times, the R5Hn may not even be in there, may have gone to a different card. I had at least three of them die before the installation was finished. This is roughly what I paid for it the first time I built it, probably the second as well, though I didn't have to replace all of the antennas the third build. Stuff is cheaper now and I was building out in a neighborhood that had convinced me that this would only meet demand for a short time. ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory Conaway To: af@afmug.com Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 2:29 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks I don’t understand how you got $500 in the RB433. Since most of these people live in relatively small wooden houses, we are simply going to do a single 5GHz backhaul and a low height 2.4GHz omni. That should cover 6-10 houses or more. Rory From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Glen Waldrop Sent: Monday, November 9, 2015 8:04 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks Let me know how you handle it. I've got about $500 in the RB433 that works as a 5GHz client and 2.4GHz AP with $50 CPE and I've not even covered expenses. Every time it gets close to breaking even we've had either a lightning strike or a tornado. Every time we start to catch up Weather.com sends us something evil. It's all their fault. ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory Conaway To: af@afmug.com Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 8:40 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks We are looking at a similar issue and the best we can come up with is a cluster solution at those prices. We are going to drop the cost down to $10 per month for homes that only use some school device like Chrome or iPad and then $20 for 5Mbps service with certain things blocked. Rory From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Glen Waldrop Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 6:47 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks Honestly, I live in rural Alabama. When the neighbors that I can't even see get too suffocating I ride through Mississippi and drive at 70mph down their four lane highways and go minutes if not several minutes between seeing houses. MS has some population centers, but at least the majority of the state I've been through are sparsely populated. Makes *any* Internet service hard to maintain and just break even. I can make a few dollars above expenses in rural Alabama and we're looking at expanding into rural MS, but even wireless is prohibitively expensive per sub in most places there. There are several stretches around Starkville, which he mentioned in the article, where there are 3+ miles between houses, seriously heavy trees. Fiber would be ridiculously expensive to run, aDSL can't cover the distances, wireless can't go through the trees. The article seems to be all about the problem and attempting to turn it into a race thing with no practical suggestions on how to fix it. I don't have an answer. Been looking at the situation and I've actually worked some numbers. Tower rental or putting one up with an AP where you can only pick up 3 subs? I've got some like that here, by the time the equipment is paid for lightning has killed it. I actually had one neighborhood start to sabotage my AP over "free" service for the Volunteer Fire Dept because it was too slow. They had a meeting I wasn't invited to discussing throwing me off the tower. I spoke to the chief, wrote a letter crunching the numbers on a per tower basis, finding that to date it has cost me $800+ to serve these people free Internet in a neighborhood that swore they'd all connect as soon as I brought it to them. Three subs, 40+ freeloaders. The VFD power bill averaged $15 a month before I offered free service for meetings, classes, etc. Everyone in the community has a key, so their light bill is $200+ now and my heaviest user in an entire county is a free service. That slowed down my expansion into the seriously rural areas, which were my intended locations for service in the first place. ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Kuhnke To: af@afmug.com Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 4:12 AM Subject: [AFMUG] Unsurprising news: Rural Mississippi broadband sucks http://www.wired.com/2015/11/the-land-that-the-internet-forgot/ yeah you're not going to get a lot of subscribers in a county where 90% of the children qualify for free school lunches... no matter what the population is, hard finding a sufficient number of people to pay $50/mo.
