I love to see this, but it's a hard sell. Philly is one of the lucky cities with reasonable competition already, one of which is Verizon's Fios - decently built out through the city. A lot of new construction homes have both Comcast* and Fios pre-wired into the home, so installation is trivial and competition is, delightfully, fierce.<p>25M wireless connections at $50 are a hard sell against 1G fiber at $80.<p>I don't mean to be a debbie-downer about this, because I think promoting connectivity is a huge boon to society.<p>* Fun fact, the new Comcast building looks like a middle finger facing west - literally flipping off the rest of the country. Seems appropriate.
Wow! Never expected we would end up on HN.<p>Happy to answer any questions.<p>Mark<p>ps: Some press and a review.<p><a href="https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/04/29/wisper-internet-service-philadelphia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/04/29/wisper-internet-se...</a><p><a href="https://dangerouslyawesome.com/2016/05/what-its-like-to-have-an-internet-provider-that-actually-cares/" rel="nofollow">https://dangerouslyawesome.com/2016/05/what-its-like-to-have...</a>
That sounds really nice; I wish them all the best luck.<p>"PhillyWisper Residential service plans are designed for personal use for 8 hours a day for general internet use including streaming, web surfing, e-mail access, and all other possible online activities. Residential customers are not allowed to host public servers of any kind, use static (public) IPv4 IP addresses, or consume more bandwidth than required to support typical residential Internet activities. PhillyWisper may disconnect or limit the bandwidth for residential customers who use residential service for activities deemed atypical at PhillyWisper’s discretion.Connection speeds for Residential service plans will fluctuate based on network demand."<p>That's not so friendly. IN fact, it's rather badly defined.<p>No mention of IPv6.
Wow I can't believe I'm seeing this on HN!<p>I worked with the co-founder Mark Steckel, and he is about as good as they get. He takes privacy and security VERY seriously (he's the only person I know that actually uses PGP!) and he's one of those guys who has forgotten more about networking than I'll ever know in my lifetime.<p>He literally answered a call one time while on the roof of a building either setting up or tweaking service for someone!<p>I don't live in the Philly area any more, but if you do I'd be willing to bet my reputation that you'll love the ISP if you get them.
I have been a customer for 3 years and have been ecstatic with their service. I think there have been maybe 2 outages in 3 years, and within minutes Mark e-mailed everyone detailing what happened, why, what he was doing to fix it, and when he expected to have maintenance finished. Observed speeds are typically higher than SLAs and as long as Mark is in business I don't plan to use anyone else.<p>When he came to install equipment I got the opportunity to go up on my roof and "help" (I know v little about networking) but it made for a really fun afternoon.
I look forward to see this business growing as it gives an alternative other than comcast and verizon which both have poor customer service. However, in Philly, 25 Mbps for $50 is expensive. In comparison I have been paying $70 a month for 100mbps with Verizon. Perhaps price will go down as customer base increases. I would also like to know more about the reliability of the service in bad weather.
At first this struck me as expensive, in the sense that per Gbps, I get a much better price from Comcast. And then I remembered all of the externalities that come along with that price: data caps, potential monitoring, bad customer support and whatever else I'm forgetting.<p>How much is avoiding those actually worth to me? Probably pretty close to the price difference, actually, and if those things are really important to me I should be willing to walk the walk and pay for them.<p>I won't, because I don't live in Philadelphia, but I hope to have real viable alternatives where I do live.
Wireless has become much better and robust in recent years, but I've honestly never been exposed to a wireless solution that was completely without issues. That's why I'll always prefer cables (as in fiber).<p>Not knowing much about Philadelphia, surely a city like that offers fiber to most houses in 2019, and it's probably not going to cost more than $50-100/month for an entry level package? I could be wrong.
It would be a nice if they would put their tower(s) locations and their range circle on the site. That would at least give a running start if they can get a signal to the destination.<p>I'd rather not need to sign up to find this information out.
I <i>think</i> that a lot of major cities have something like this... It just tends to not be advertised broadly. For instance, New Orleans (not exactly a tech hub) has at least 2 companies like this[0] and I've only accidentally found out about them. I wish I could try one of these, but I'm outside of their coverage area.<p>"WISP <city>" seems to be the search term if you're looking for something like this in your city.<p>[0] <a href="http://southwan.com/coverage/" rel="nofollow">http://southwan.com/coverage/</a> & <a href="http://skycom1.com/about-us/" rel="nofollow">http://skycom1.com/about-us/</a> & <a href="https://www.nolabroadband.com/our-services/residential/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nolabroadband.com/our-services/residential/</a>
Very cool! Always great to see fellow WISP folks on HN! For those curious about the industry: there are something like 500 wireless ISPs (WISPs) in the U.S. and many more outside of the U.S. <a href="http://www.wispa.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.wispa.org</a> is the de-facto standard organization in the U.S. and runs a few conferences throughout the year. The largest WISP in the U.S. today is Rise Broadband (<a href="https://www.risebroadband.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.risebroadband.com/</a>) - most are considerably smaller. I worked at Rise for about 10 years and have spent basically my whole career working for Wireless ISPs in the U.S.
> we’ll just need clear line of sight from your roof to our towers<p>I don't know what the real estate market is like in the parts of Phila. they're operating in, but in an area with lots of new construction, this could be an interesting issue when a proposed new structure would block existing customers.
> we’ll just need clear line of sight from your roof to our towers.<p>Wouldn't it make sense to also implement mesh networking locally, so you wouldn't need a line-of-sight connection to every subscriber?
What are they using? I had Clear using WiMax for a few years and it was <i>good enough</i> until they shut down. I was tired of all the cable shenanigans.
I work out of Indyhall. Philly's most popular coworking space. I'm using Philly Whisper right now.<p>We only use it because Comcast couldn't keep our connection working. We're literally on Market street two blocks from Independence Hall. Within 5 blocks is the Philadelphia Mint. Numerous Federal courts, etc. And we still can't get a reliable connection.<p>Philly Whisper still goes down occasionally. We've had it go down twice in the past 60 days. They are super responsive but at the end of the day the internet going down for hours is still money lost.<p>I have FIOS at home and I've only ever seen it go down at night and it's because of a router update.<p>Disclaimer: I used to work for Comcast. Would not recommend.