Notes from running WISPs.
Network design, monitoring, and hard-won lessons from two decades of building and supporting fixed-wireless ISPs.
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How to Start a WISP in 2026: A Step-by-Step Guide
A step-by-step guide to starting a wireless internet service provider in 2026, rewritten from the series we first published in 2013: market research against Starlink, fibre and the cell companies' home internet, finding wholesale internet, and the rest of the steps as they're written.
Starting a WISP in 2026 – Step 1: Market Research
How to work out whether there's a market for a new wireless ISP in 2026: where Starlink and fibre win, how far the cell companies' home internet really reaches, what makes a good low-density WISP market, how to size up an existing WISP, and the broadband maps and coverage tools that show you all of it before you buy a radio.
How to Detect a Failing WISP Backhaul Before Your Subscribers Notice
A troubleshooting guide for wireless backhauls: how to measure capacity and latency on one link in isolation, what the signal and modulation history tells you about the cause (mount failures, rain fade, wet connectors, tree growth, interference, DFS hits), and how to keep customers happy on a degraded link until you can get out to fix it.
Is Generic Network Monitoring Software Good Enough for a WISP?
Where general-purpose NMS tools like LibreNMS, Zabbix, PRTG and the Dude stop being enough for a wireless ISP, and what to look for instead: per-minute pings on every customer radio, measured backhaul capacity, passive TCP latency, vendor support beyond SNMP, and alerting defaults built for WISPs.
Multiple Gateways as You Grow: Five Ways WISPs Connect to the Internet
The five gateway configurations WISPs grow through, from a single default route to full-tables BGP on ARM64 MikroTiks to geographically diverse gateways balanced with MPLS/TE, and the trade-offs of each.
Five Ways to Stretch Your IPv4 Space (and What Each One Costs You)
How the IPv4 assignment strategies for WISPs compare, from per-AP public subnets and PPPoE to deterministic CGNAT and dual-stack IPv6, with the trade-offs for gaming, abuse handling, and law enforcement requests.
Archive
Older articles, kept for reference — accurate when written, preserved because they're still widely linked.