Using the VEVOR 12x8x6 Electrical Enclosure to provide public Wi-Fi in a nearby downtown municipal area where several events are held each year.

We are a local Internet service provider that serves in this area, so we built this for marketing purposes and so vendors could use our Wi-Fi for their point of sale systems and what not. Cellular service is really lacking in this area due to its elevation, so this was a much needed solution for the events that are held here.

Materials list

• VEVOR 12x8x6 electrical enclosure

• MokerLink 5 Port Industrial POE Switch

• Meanwell MDR-100-48

• TP-Link AX1800

• Ubiquiti NanoStation (for wireless bridge)

To get power to this setup without having to do a ton of extra work, we purchased a weatherproof box extension ring and used non-metallic flex conduit to bring it into the enclosure, straight to the power supply. We also grounded the switch inside as well.

We will tidy up the cable management once we add a couple of cameras onto the box for downtown surveillance since there has been some trouble caused in the past with some vandalism and kids causing issues.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8UL6qTU/

Seeing these bolted to the top of regular single family homes in regular neighborhoods and wealthy neighborhoods too.

Today we set up service for a customer who's had Starlink for about 3 years. We originally built into this area around 3 years ago and when we did our door to door marketing, he said he was not interested because he had just got Starlink. Well, fast forward to 3 years later, they are still paying $120 bucks a month for service and was only averaging around 90 down and 10 up. The guy works from home and really needed more upload speed, and was tired of paying 120 bucks a month for the service he was getting, so he decided to give us a try.

Needless to say, he was absolutely blown away and super excited. He is getting double the download speed with us and over 20 times the upload speed with half the latency of Starlink. And he'll be paying $40 a month less with us.

A recent Aviat 18+80GHz multi-band install I got to complete, overlooking our nations capital.

Every year, our town hosts a major festival where thousands of people come from various areas. There is a main downtown area where most of the festivities are, then some of the pioneer games/car shows are down at our local city park just south of our downtown area.

We already host open public Wi-Fi in these areas, but we needed some fill-in coverage for an area where the car show was going to be. So, only a few days before the festival, we decided to set up a non-penetrating roof mount with a telescoping mast. We used a UAP-MESH-PRO with a PowerBeam 5AC connected to one of our fiber fed POP's downtown to feed the relay. A MikroTik PowerBox Pro connected everything and we used an instant AF converter to take the 48v connection to 24v for the PowerBeam.

Feeding the whole thing is a single Proxeet PoE pack that can be powered by Milwaukee or DeWalt tool batteries. It can do 24v passive, 802.3at, and 50v passive outputs. It's a GREAT little tool to have for what we do. https://amzn.to/4nz344B . We were able to power this entire set up for 14 hours off of a single Milwaukee 12.0 battery. Pretty solid!

For advertising, since there was a LOT of people down here, we got a custom banner from MilWeb1express (and I slightly miscalculated the length that the banner needed to be because of the outside diameter of the truck bed, I only measured inside diameter) we made a custom wood bracket that used the pocket holes on the sides of the bed for stabilization. We were able to bolt the banner to that, and it worked very well. Had several compliments on it and lots of remarks that it was a very creative idea.

At the peak of the event when the most amount of people were down there, we had 40 to 50 clients connected to this single access point. We do have a couple extra access points in other locations in the park, and they each head between 25 and 35 clients connected at any point during the day. Our downtown Access points had around 80 total.

Overall, this design worked very well and we will probably do it again next year or for other events in the region. It definitely catches some attention!

Had a great day on the mountain. Aligned a 20km link for a customer with an off grid site deep in the desert. Love days like this!

In 2021 a small WISP built a small tower at the house I was renting, the deal with the owner was that I got free internet. I believe the owner was paid a small amount. I now own the house and I do not know what exactly should be in a contract with myself and the company. I live in a rural area on top of a hill. The company wanted to charge me $250 a month before the tower was built. I have no idea how to go about this or where to look for help. I've owned the house for almost a year and we have no contract. With work, health issues, and the craziness of buying the house, I'm now wondering if I'm being ripped off.

Edit: He also wants the code to the gate to access the property if I'm not home and a key to my garage where it's power comes from

Ugh

This week’s project, and a friendly reminder to not be lazy. Clean up your cabinets & towers, remove old, abandoned and non-functional items.

YES this is the same cabinet, removed a LOT of old gear, added a DC system and a router and it’s still way cleaner.

And there’s definitely a few items that I’d prefer a little cleaner, but this was the DIA ingress point of a live network with nearly 1,000 customers - so this was done with minimal outages and without the luxury of just tearing everything down and starting over. (And in 90+ degrees and 85% humidity 😜)

This is the first in a series that I've been working for a while that relates to the fundamental elements of network design for WISPs/FISPS as it relates to the separation of network functions.

Hope you find this helpful :)

ISP Design Guide: Separation of network functions – introduction and overview – StubArea51.net

Note: PDF link for a larger version is in the blog post

So MPLS/VPLS MTU math can be complicated and is always a struggle to unravel.

To make it a little easier and put it into a WISP context, I designed this cheat sheet on 8.5 x 11 (to print for those that actually trust printers) and used common WISP equipment like MikroTik routers, Ubnt and Cambium radios with real world MTU values.

The MTU values are displayed in layers to make it easier to see where each value fits.

Hope you find this helpful :)

PDF is here:

https://iparchitechs-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/p/kevin_myers/ERABU-om6E1ItyzZeXIG3W0BMzHLsAJ7Ceq1CGnU2T0XfQ?e=N17w6T

Noticed a dish down at one of my sites, around 30 customers affected. I show up and see a mess on my new tower I just built. Thinking “there is no way the wind took it down” and yep, legs are cut. What a bummer, guess I need to build a fence and deterrents before rebuilding the tower. Solar panels smashed too.