I love Mikrotik but it kinda checks out. They're a high grade consumer/light commercial vendor more than utility scale commercial grade. I'd use them if I was trying to setup internet for my street or a small-medium sized office but not for my whole neighborhood. Their remote management utilities and software updates are good but not enough to keep me from having to ever get physical access to everything.

Weird I thought I answered this.

Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night.

ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6.

MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table.

Theres other issues too. I could really go all day.

Great homelab stuff. I use it too.

A website that sort of sucks is one of my business legitimacy tests.

But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.

This is the most accurate description of wisp information handoff I've ever seen.

> the good advice costs money and is indistinguishable for the lay person from the bad advice

the lay person also may not be able to identify who's advice is worth paying for

Eh in general sure. But if you're giving networking advice you definitely want to either opinionatedly not use TLS ('use case doesn't warrant it, so am against HTTPS all the things'), or have a valid cert.

It's fixed for a point in time. Launches of new satellites have considerable lead time.

Eh theres downlink capacity and then IP transit capacity from land sites too.

Chiming in from the Magic: The Gathering fandom.

Here in New Zealand 4G has proved to work surprisely well for FWA (Fixed Wireless Access). I think the important thing is that the providers need to be very strict at limiting the number of customers they sell to. Here, the providers will proactively stop selling new FWA connection in a certain area the tower sector serving that area is getting close to capacity limits. They'll also check where the customer is located and ensure they can actually provide a decent service. This check is done automatically off coverage and capacity data.

Most of the major FWA providers are mobile phone carriers, so both mobile and FWA customers actually use the same tower/spectrum/etc so the general increase in demand (especially from mobile given they can't stop selling new mobile servcies) sometimes results in a good service in Year 1 degrading to poorer service in subsquent years. However the carriers can easily resolve that by adding more 4G carriers, deploying 5G, and even building new cell sites (which kills two birds with one stone -- better coverage for mobile users and more capacity for FWA users).

When FWA first came out I confess that I thought it was a silly idea until my eldery mother accepted an incentive from her provider (cheaper monthly fee) if she moved onto FWA (from ADSL previously). She's zero complaints. And sure enough it works well for a low-end user -- emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTube, etc all work just as good on FWA as it does on fibre/DSL/Cable/etc. She happens to be close enough to the tower and that tower has also been upgraded and has heaps of 4G carriers so the service is consisently good.

YMMV but when done well, 4G/5G FWA is a great option for low-end users.

I'm writing from 4G, the same that I use to work remotely as a software engineer. It's not even a dedicated 'home internet' solution, just an unlimited data plan that I use with a decent modem/antenna.

(Yes obviously latency is worse than fibre, I would probably hate it if I was still into FPS gaming etc., but in practice it's fine.)

(When I set it up it was better and cheaper than the copper options, fibre not available. Fibre or Starlink would now probably be better, but still each much more expensive, even ignoring one-time costs. I don't need it/not worth it. Idk about latency but I could certainly get more bandwidth out of one-time costs on LTE too.)

I tried out (US) T-Mobile's small business internet, and while it wasn't useful for me, if I was a little more normal or had worked a little harder with sales to get what I needed, it would be fine. The v6 connectivity was pretty good, v4 is CGNAT, unless you sign up for a static IP, which needs an EIN business account; the sales rep can sign you up for a static IP with a SSN business account, but it will be deleted and they won't add it back.

Also, I forgot which equipment they gave me, but it had terrible buffer bloat, and did some nasty nasty arp spoofing when I placed it on my network and made everything bad, and it wouldn't let me put it on XX.2.0/24 and have a static route for XX.0.0/24 so maybe I could keep it roughly contained. Maaaaybe I could have done something with VLANs, but I was done at that point. I'm still grumpy because it took 3 months and contacting the CEO email address to get the bill settled, but they did settle it. Not exactly a risk free trial in my book.

Speed and latency was good though, as long as you didn't hit bufferbloat. I don't remember exactly, but 500M+ down, 200M+ up, < 25 ms ping; CGNAT brought the speeds down to about 100M, but most CDNs are v6 capable now, and most people aren't that bothered by CGNAT. Obviously you and I and a lot of others here have reasons to want their own v4 address, but a lot of people in a lot of places can't get one on any home internet, so. Of course, speed and latency vary a lot by your reception, but I live on a heavily forested and very hilly island; I am at a high point, but surrounded by trees so eh?

I have 5G home internet in the US and haven't had issues. Fiber is at capacity on our side of the street and we don't have other options.

What service have you tried that didn't work well for you?

From India, and right now I have unlimited 5G data plan on my cellular that works pretty well. In someplaces it get's 4G also.

Eh, my ISP (Comcast) has extremely unreliable internet across two different homes I've lived in, to the point that I absolutely rely on having both a 5G modem and a wired one. If my 5G signal was strong enough to keep me going on a rainy day, I would absolutely ditch the wired connection and its flaky mysterious dropped packets.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a wired connection. But if my isp can't even be bothered to give me a functional connection more than 90% of the time...

I just switched from long-range wireless to Starlink basic. It's 50% cheaper and much, much more reliable. Speeds are comparable (when the long-range wifi wasn't down, which it was pretty often). Long-range wifi had a data cap with crazy overage fees, Starlink is unlimited.

In my area, fiber and cable aren’t available. If you’re lucky, you can get 5 mbps DSL for $70+ per month.

The only credible options are WISP, Starlink, and cellular. WISP is the same price as Starlink and is slower / less reliable. Cellular is cheaper but gets slow at peak hours.

In short, the local WISP has been losing a lot of customers to Starlink and T-Mobile Home Internet.

And vastly slower speeds...

Starlink is a replacement for dial-up, satellite, and in some cases legacy DSL- pretty much nothing else.

Regional pricing means it's 500-560 USD up-front to buy the receiver. Then, 50-100 USD per month for the residential plan, which includes unlimited data.

That's not too bad. However, there's no speed listed. Third party reviews state 100/10 Mbps (up/down), which is not too bad considering the same site states a UK average of 75/15.

The vast majority of the UK has pretty slow speeds.

That said, unlimited internet subscriptions over fiber can be had for as little as 20 USD per month, which is far cheaper.

Considering that they're still iterating on and launching satellites, it doesn't really matter that they'll only last 5 years. It isn't like they're launching the constellation and then sitting on it waiting for the satellites to fall out of the sky.

For now they're having to launch a Falcon 9 twice a week to build up the constellation, but with Starship intended to be able to launch the equivalent of several F9 launches in one go, maintaining the constellation will become much easier.

The Kirkland brand, which is a Costco subsidiary, is actually named after the town. So I imagine not.

I wrote that with the best being optimism. I'm 100% sure these trenches, despite them being in our easements, is the property of AT&T for their exclusive use only. I can still wish that wasn't the case, but I'm not that naive.

Regulatory capture and the regulator being in bed with the incumbents. Not Canada-specific even, this is a common problem in a lot of countries when it comes to telecoms.

Overregulation. Source, I work in telecom in Canada.

Ask TekSavvy that question.

Neither in San Francisco.

In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH.

It of course never happened.