Hacker News Reader

Comment by jo_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm a current WebPass subscriber and I'm dreading the move to another ISP when I change apartments. May I inquire what it takes to set up and maintain the transmitter?

View on HN

I believe the transmitters are pretty expensive. In the $10,000 range, depending on the frequency and power required.

So there's cost if you want to own one. Plus you need to convince someone (Webpass I guess?) to point one of theirs at you to complete the link.

It's probably easiest to convince the owner of your new apartment to pay Webpass's setup fee, where they own the equipment and wire the building. Although having tried that a couple of times, it's a pain in the ass.

Perhaps because of this: https://backchannel.com/the-new-payola-deals-landlords-cut-w...

The receivers themselves for a consumer you can get for < ~$1,000 for one that will be able to handle a couple of hundred Mbps easy. Getting someone else to point directly at you would cost a lot. Or doing both ends yourself. The business model for ie. WebPass is not to point to every customer, but to point to one point in say a neighborhood and then run cables from that to every house in the neighborhood. Which is a fraction of the cost of running cables all over cities.

At Least, that will be the business model under Google Fiber.

The biggest requirement is to have line of sight to the headend or some other already connected building.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com