[BAWUG] WISPs in Tahoe

[Eric Sobalvarro]

So this weekend I found a new ISP in the Lake Tahoe area called EXWIRE. 
 They have a few hotspots around town, and I can pick up one of thier 
"business & home user APs" from my livingroom in Tahoe Donner up there. 
 I used thier service at the coffee shop the other day and was very 
pleased with it's performance (I should be at $2.50/hr).  Dialing up in 
Tahoe (at least at my place) is 14.4k PERIOD - so anything faster is a 
welcome relief.  Based on what I could gather they've simply thrown up a 
captive portal off a Pacific Bell DSL line (like 256 max) - this is dirt 
cheap to do, I mean they get 10-15 hours off this ap and they've paid 
thier monthly on that line.

Anyway so I've been having an email exchange with these folks and the AP 
that I'm picking up is not a hotspot, consequently I'd need to pay them 
US$300.00 to have them set up an antenna and a premise equipment to get 
a cat-5 connection.  I'm assuming that this is done b/c that way they 
can "lock down" the service by MAC addy - hehe.  I also noticed that 
from time to time the ap that I was monitoring during my field survey 
did some channel hopping and was WEP'd.

Here's a link to the site if you're interested:
http://www.exwire.com/
They have a "second home" program where upi pay $20.00/month to keep the 
lights on and $4.00 a day when you use it to a max of $48.00 which is 
their monthly full access fee.  This of course requires their antenna 
and premise equipment (a little steep for me at this point).

Is anyone aware of a good place where I can read more about the setups 
WISPS are using these days?

Is there a centralized db of US WISPS somewhere?

-E.



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