Monkeybrains has been a WISP at least four years. [0]
They also sell service in a Carrier Hotel. I read an article a long while back where they mentioned that:
1) The $250 installation fee, plus the $35/month monthly fee more than covers the costs for each residential customer.
2) The revenue from the stuff in the Hotel would also cover the cost for the residential customers, if the residential customers stopped paying their bills or something.
Ha, that is an old service map! We have close to 5000 antennas up now. Also, Business WISP is the new revenue hog for us... Colocation is stable, but not growing. Residential WISP is also growing (and has outstripped colocation). - Rudy
Yikes! I should have re-read my comment. My prose doesn't make it at all clear that I was pointing to a four year old map. (Sorry about that! :( ) An up-to-date coverage map can be found under the "Coverage Map" section here [0].
It's neat to hear how your new revenue sources have changed over the years. Hope you guys keep growing the business and -one day- push Comcast and ATT out of The City!
MonkeyBrains is not quite what we call "WiFi"; it's in the 80GHz spectrum. (I thought it was 60GHz, which is becoming a WiFi spectrum, but their page says 80. So I don't fully understand what they're up to.)
Beamforming and directional antennas works really quite interestingly on the higher frequencies. I think their stuff could work. It's not obviously doomed to failure, like most 2.4GHz-based WiFi setups are, in my opinion anyway :)
What we are up to is building a high speed 24Ghz/60GHz/80GHz point to point meshed network. MonkeyBrains will continue to pull fiber to our endpoints and continue with more affordable 5GHz antennas for residential users.
Check out Siklu, SAF, AthenaWave, AirFiber, etc to see some of the antennas that talk outside of (normally) consumer grade frequencies.
And yes, we do have an FCC filing in place to deploy 80GHz gear.
