We do it.
We manage our entire WISP network like a giant Hotspot. People can choose all sorts of different plans that are tailored for the particular tower, town, or marina they are at. The most speed offerings we currently have at any one location is 2, although we could have many. We can also have those broken down into multiple versions of a cap (we call it a fair-use quota). The most time periods we have at any one location is about 7 (hourly, daily, weekend, week, month, quarter, year). This is because of the seasonal nature of our customers. Marinas have residents more in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. Although we have one marina with giant boats and many of them live aboard year round. Doing it this way, the Mikrotiks control speeds, bursting, and throttling and we never have to bill or collect any money from anyone. If a user moves around on the lake between different marinas, the centralized RADIUS lets him take his settings with him. We have a some APs on a couple of marinas that have sectors pointing to public and State campgrounds, so we pick up that business too. Outdoor UniFis are great for all of this, and we use lots of them on sectors like this. When Wireless Orbit closed its doors, we scrambled to find a back end portal to do all this and we finally settled on one. They are doing some customization for us now to get things the way we want. It is so nice now to be able to see/change all the user data in the SQL database. Wireless Orbit stunk in that respect. If you would like to see our progress, and what the users see, visit http://tinyurl.com/ksqn7zq From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of heith petersen Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 9:11 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] Internet Packages regarding geography We are getting to the point in a lot of our markets that we need to offer different speed packages. Issue being some markets, being 900 or slightly sub-par infrastructure, we wouldn’t be able to promote these packages across the board. Was curious if others are offering packages to different areas that would not be possible in some? And if so, do you get any backlash from those who cannot get those packages? Is it appropriate to offer extended packages to users on one tower when another tower down the road wouldn’t be capable of these packages? Its bad but we just offer a residential rate, no matter if that customer can get 1 meg down via Canopy 900 or close to 10 meg on a UBNT SM. I have caught a little heat in an area where we fired up 900 about 4 years ago to a market that had only satellite. Then we hooked up a tower in a small town 4 miles away with UBNT M2 and news spread like wild fire. We went from 40 900 subs to about a dozen, and a pile of radios I don’t want to deploy again. Shame on me for not offering the extended packages at that time for those wanting more bandwidth. I also have the area outside my home town that Century Link offers what they claim is 12 meg service, but it never gets close. I am constantly adding more sectors in these areas, Im getting to the point where I am adding UBNT to offload Canopy, then adding more UBNT to offload the UBNT that was offloading the Canopy, it gets to be a vicious circle. I am already $20 per month more than CL, not sure if a lot of customers would stay if I were to charge them more for what they are getting now. Once again shame on me. The bosses think the prices should be the same across the board, but technically performances cannot be matched across the board, plus Im running ragged satisfying existing customers when I should be looking at new areas, and start the vicious circle all over again LOL. thanks heith
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