Fixed Wireless Business

Wireless in the Keys

When this ISP faced hurricane Wilma, it deployed the experience and teamwork that had allowed it to survive other ISP industry disasters like deregulation.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 4, 2006]

We're always glad to see an independent ISP do well. We saw a positive review of Key Largo, Fla.-based TerraNovaNet on BroadbandReports and e-mailed the company with a quick note, "Saw your positive ratings on www.broadbandreports.com and read your about section. You're an interesting company! I would like to write a profile, whenever you have the time." The interview was conducted by e-mail.

Q: So the wireless equipment held up in the hurricanes?

Down here, most of Comcast's infrastructure went down and some areas were never completely repaired. It took them months to get the majority operational again. BellSouth took major hits. Ground level DSLAMs flooded and flying jungle took out a major percentage of their twisted pair infrastructure. They had residential repairs out two months and more. We lost two towers. One tower on a hotel rooftop we had back up and operational the day after the storm. The other took a week because a paging company had overloaded it and winds twisted it to the ground. The paging company has been dealt with so that won't happen again.

That was all Wilma. The first three hurricanes we lost only individual customer installations. We had to run on generator power for four days, but all our services stayed up. Our DSL and dialup customer access depended on BellSouth's twisted pair transport availability. About sixty percent of our wireless infrastructure was operational when Wilma left. That went to eighty percent by nightfall and ninety-five percent the next day. The remaining infrastructure was a week to replace that tower. Most of our wireless customers had service when they had electricity. No one waited over a week after they called in for repair. As you can see, I'm really proud of this little seven person company. Like our local electric co-op, they are the best of the best. And they're all family. They started eighteen hour days before Wilma stopped whacking us to keep up the family name.

Q: How did you transition from providing 28.8 Kbps dialup in 1996 to broadband etc. now?

Slowly and carefully. It's been a ten year ride and chunks haven't been fun at all. The beginning was great, modem stacks and a billion wall warts to live with. Then our first modem concentrator. Oh boy, we're cookin' now. We don't have any money but Travis has FreeBSD and can build anything. This is great. Let's invent something else.

All the money but rice, beans, mortgage and utilities went back into the business. We stepped up to Portmasters and PRIs and led the pack with V.92. We did frame relay for dedicated accounts like hotels. We monitored dialup failures and digital circuits and Travis got a reputation as a magician for showing up to fix things before the customer called. We called dialup customers to tell them to take their cap lock off and the whole company got a rep for being mysteriously superior.

But then we got too many customers and it took too many human resources to deal with the masses. Managers and unreliable employees and it stopped being fun. But Travis heard about wireless and we bought some Breezecom frequency hopping stuff. That was fun but we're pretty limited on who we can sell to with $1,500 installations. At least the learning curve is here to enjoy. You can't put a tower up like that. Line of sight is line of sight. This ain't VHF spectrum!

Then [we were helped by the] luck of the draw when BellSouth was wooing the PUCs for LD approval. We got pulled out of the hat for ADSL infrastructure. I called the ADSL manager for South Florida and he never heard of the Florida Keys. This might be fun. And I'm sure it was [only then that] BellSouth discovered Monroe County was half mile wide by a hundred and twenty miles long. But we got the ADSL infrastructure with minor low density population holes. The learning curve was more irritation than fun. There were early hardware headaches and BellSouth hadn't quite figured it all out yet.

Then there's the growing realization that we have hundreds of dialup margin customers with digital circuit expectations. We're driving thirty miles down island so we can tell BellSouth it's broken at the NID instead to telling the customer to buy a new modem or re-install dialup networking. We're definitely not having fun anymore. After a period of mutual funk, Travis walked in one day and said he was going out to invent a replacement for DSL. Last time I saw him for months. He was spending his nights on hotel rooftops doing I don't know what. I started thinking he'd gotten into astronomy!

He showed up one day with a shopping list sifted from the pieces he'd been buying. We had nice big DSSS pipes to a couple of hotels we'd upgraded from frame relay. So it was reasonable to deploy a couple 11 Mbps CCK access points on their rooftops and hook up consumer bridges to them. Thus began the equipment parade [that every pioneer WISP suffered through], but we had a service with an install price competitive with DSL. You want to buy a bunch of CB3s?

I'll fast forward before this turns into a book. Travis insisted we go higher and use a more traditional approach. So we built a Trango link to the Clear Channel tower ten miles down island. And we got rid of the DSSS equipment and did Trango links from here for businesses. We put Karlnet equipment on the Clear Channel tower and that was an expensive learning curve. But we did learn all about environmental conditions and 802.11 along the way. Today, the Clear Channel tower is our major backhaul infrastructure, with redundant 50 Mbps links to the operations center which is where I am.

The Clear Channel tower also provides three 2.4 GHz and three 5 GHz access points. The 5 GHz broadcasts are used for enterprise class business connections and backhauls to smaller cells. We've got 27 cells in production now with one to three access points each. Our dialup terminals make great emergency back-up for our wireless customers. We've kept a V.34 terminal operational for people with only cell phones. ADSL makes a good placeholder where we don't yet have infrastructure and great fail-over for inexpensive carrier class connectivity, $175 per month for 5Mbps wireless with ADSL failover.

Complete installation $250. Great service at a fair price. Same thing we did in 1996.