What is a WISP?

WISP is a Wireless Internet Service Provider; they normally use wireless networking technology to offer customers with poor or non-existent broadband coverage, access to superior broadband speeds. These customers tend to live in areas where their broadband coverage is less than adequate, often located in more rural areas of the country where there is no fibre optic cable infrastructure already in place.

WISP is something we happen to know a lot about, as we are one ourselves! Our Superhero Broadband service in Suffolk has helped many of our customers gain access to superior broadband speeds, when BT and Virgin simply don’t have the resources to offer reasonable broadband speeds with their existing cable networks.

A typical WISP setup would usually involve a main base station equipped with something similar to a Ubiquiti airMAX M2 Titanium Variable Beam Sector and a Ubiquiti airMAX M5 Rocket or airMAX Rocket Prism AC Gen2, combined with a Ubiquiti airMAX AC Rocket Dish Antenna or the Ubiquiti airFiber 5XHD WISP PtP in order to feed the main high speed connection over longer distances to those more remote areas.

On the client side at the customer’s home, we would normally install something from the Ubiquiti AirMAX range, like a Powerbeam or Nanobeam dish on the outside of their house, and inside their home, there are a number of options for routers like the MikroTik RouterBoard hAP AC Lite or the Ubiquiti airMax airCube AC.

We have seen many of our customers benefit from our WISP high speed broadband in locations where they were not able to get the most out of their previous broadband internet setup. WISPs are becoming more and more popular in rural and remote areas, as customers realise they need faster, more reliable connection speeds to keep up with modern HD streaming services and the increasing number of WiFi enabled devices in the average home.