6-7-12 Podcast – Future Proof Your WISP and Fiber Terminations

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5 responses to “6-7-12 Podcast – Future Proof Your WISP and Fiber Terminations”

1. 

   edward

   2012-06-26

   Good videos, tons of info. Once some linking starts to happen and the search engines gets ahold of this, this will take off. I’m a new WISP to be and soaking up everything I can find.

   Topics that I’m curious about:

   WISP business development (how do you guys market/promote your products). How do markets with challenging topographies compare to those that are flat (I’m just starting off in the Pacific Northwest and am finding the mountains around here a challenge initially, but it may get easier in time??).

   Also, Captive portal best practices? I’ve heard Mikrotiks can do this, but are they just part of the puzzle?

   Tower stuff – tower safety and insurance issues. Also, when looking for towers, how do you approach them? Work with big boys like American Tower, or scout out existing companies? Do you do a site survey (climb the tower) before you sign a lease? Why run fiber up the tower (just to save the number of copper runs? is it to isolate from lightening?). How to construct various tower attachments…

   Thanks so much! Look forward to the next video blog.

   Edward

   Reply
   1. 

      edward

      2012-06-26

      Couple more ideas that came to mind:

      Free space optics, ever? Useless? Whatever happened to Terrabeam?

      What about leveraging last mile solutions to hide the traffic? EG I have a friend who has residential internet at his small coffee shop (only room for 10 users max) in his shop. won’t let him use this connection for a hotspot and don’t have a product he can use. They are the only real bandwidth option he can get. I have datacenter presence and he could tunnel the traffic through me. (I’d prefer to beam him a connection, still working on that). First – is this common, or do they catch onto this? Sneaky workaround? Is this what you guys refer to as “loop & swoop”?

      Reply
      1. 

         greg

         2012-06-26

         @Edward
         Thanks for the feedback, I’ll add all of this to the hopper.

         When we talk of the loop and swoop we are referring to tunneling all traffic through a DC presence. If the traffic is moving through a tunnel, especially if it is encrypted in any way(though most ISPs aren’t clever enough nor do they have the time to attempt to look into your packets), then it will just look like steady traffic from point A to point B…nothing suspicious about that.

         Reply
         1. 

            edward

            2012-06-27

            Got it. Thanks! What is “DC presence”?

            More on the Captive Portal. Since posting, I’ve been digging into this and sharing the challenges that I find as a self-teaching user is facing. These MT’s amaze me, amazingly versatile platform, but without docs or training, impossible to learn.

            I notice the Hotspot service creates a bunch of dynamic Filter and NAT rules, some of which break things: I have a Hotspot/CP set up on Eth5 with its own DHCP services that serves a separate AP. That interface has an address assignment of 10.5.1.1 with a DHCP Server. I have a DHCP Client on Eth1, and traffic on this subnet can ping the 10.5.1.1 subnet just fine. When I add or enable the hotspot, it blocks traffic originating from eth1, and I’ve traced it to the first two dyanamic Filter Rules.

            The underlyig topics that are too complex for me (For now) are the more advanced dynamic firewall filter rules, how they work, (jumping, etc), how to work around them without screwing up the things you need to keep. Some of these appear to be in place to prevent hacking the captive portal.

            Anyway, just some ideas for “The Hopper” (pronounced the hawpah).

            Reply
2. 

   edward

   2012-06-26

   The filtering engine took out words I had in tag quotes. Inside the words ‘cable comapny x’ before ‘Wont let him’ above.

   Reply