The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik).
Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested.
A wisp operator can:
1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz.
2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO.
3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density
4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options.
5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt.
What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.
> Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik
Why this association? At least on the consumer side, I've really enjoyed using Mikrotik's stuff for my homelab. Is it just a sign of "someone not wanting to pony up for Real Networking Gear" or something similar?
I love Mikrotik but it kinda checks out. They're a high grade consumer/light commercial vendor more than utility scale commercial grade. I'd use them if I was trying to setup internet for my street or a small-medium sized office but not for my whole neighborhood. Their remote management utilities and software updates are good but not enough to keep me from having to ever get physical access to everything.
Juniper for routing. The neat trick with wisps with broken networks is to just drop a big juniper device in their core and edge, and replace 10 mikrotiks and suddenly a large tranche of angry customers just stop calling.
The big questions come at the tower. Juniper doesn't have a massive POE tower switch. The options there can be all bad. Its this huge mess. AC or DC, backup or no backup etc etc. And there are always drawbacks. I had a customer purchase a massive cambium tower switch with all the bells and whistles only for it to occasionally lock up and forward on all ports like a hub. Netonix can be good, however their failure rate is higher than I would like, and the support always tries to blame your grounding on returns. But the interface is easy to teach to junior techs, and other than some weird issues with linux partition size and their vlan implementation they just go. The ubiquiti tower switches are a lot of fun. I dont know if its still the case but for a few firmware versions they had half the config only available in a legacy interface. But once you made a change in the legacy interface, all the labels you set in the new interface are lost.
RF last mile for residentials, Ubiquiti/Cambium. They both work well in some respects and suck in others.
NEC for backhaul if you can get it. Otherwise there are some decent ubnt/cambo options also. ubnt has come a long way in 60GHz.
Ubiquiti’s hardware is limited in some respects whereby with Mikrotik you can implement anything, its just a matter of how and the performance. Ubiquiti for core, especially when deploying CGNAT, is a bad idea.
Is there something similar to Ubiquiti's "unified configuration" thing (where you can configure your whole network in a coherent way, maybe even from some gui)?
I love my Mikrotik homelab setup, but it's held together by carefully crafted per-box configs that are not easy to change all together (e.g. adding another VLAN, etc).
Maybe it's just my newbie status at this, but hopefully there's some cool piece of software that I just don't know about yet!
MikroTik is actually mostly configured via a GUI. It's pretty rare to use CLI except to automate stuff.
However, there is only a limited "Quick Settings" option, which supports most basic configurations. For anything more advanced, you do actually have to set it up yourself.
However, the problem with recommending Ubiquiti in the context of an ISP, is that once you hit a wall with it, you are done. You cannot change things that are not supported to be changed, you cannot make it do something it was not "designed" to do.
On Ubiquiti, you can ssh into the VyOS-derived OS on the EdgeRouter (if talking about EdgeOS), but anything you do there cannot be accessed from the webui anymore, and changing anything in the webui will of course destroy what you changed manually over SSH.
At that point, you have an offbrand Linux router that is hindering you, and you either go with MikroTik or upgrade to Cisco equipment. But that Ubiquiti is going on a shelf.
In general, it's quite different running an ISP and running a homelab.
With MikroTik, you can make ANYTHING and everything. And there is no paywall for additional features like some vendors.
Finally, to underline my point, it is required to learn MikroTik's RouterOS before starting an ISP, if you don't want to end up with problems.
Ubiquiti has a prosumer version of everything on an ISPs checklist, but most of it is either too expensive or under featured. Eventually you outgrow it and thats when you face a large expense to get out of it. Other than RF and hardware to support RF that is. Their tower switches are reasonably scalable, and some of their other kit, like FibrePOE is situationally ok.
Anyway, they ship buggy code on overtaxed hardware that keeps me up at night.
ROS 7 was a disaster from 7.0 to 7.11, and it shipped on hardware that couldn't be rolled back to 6.
MPLS and OSPF have been huge victims of this. MPLS forwarding table often freezing and not updating. OSPF variables conking out causing protocol flaps, or not adding routes to the route table.
Theres other issues too. I could really go all day.
If one were to go from a bigger scale from a home lab to, say, wiring up all the units in my condo building to share the same internet connection somehow (or maybe a multi-AP wifi setup in a small business like a climbing gym), what would you go with equipment wise?
A website that sort of sucks is one of my business legitimacy tests.
But it has to be the correct sort of suck, it's got to suck in the "I'm an old sys-admin and can't be arsed to care about these javascript frameworks" sort of way and not in the "I am in sales and need 150 tracking agents" manner.
The issue is that wisp owners are cowboys, who dont ever follow through with good practices. Their networks, often due to guides like this website, end up riddled with technical debt (Technical debt is usually but not always branded Mikrotik).
Starlink doesnt offer layer 2 services. Starlink doesnt offer half rate backup services. Starlink doesnt offer installation. Starlink can often be very congested.
A wisp operator can:
1. Pull fibre into an area and then distribute it via 60GHz.
2. Pull fibre a bit further away and use decent APs with good MIMO.
3. Use profits from the above to pull fibre closer and ultimately overbuild themselves in areas with enough density
4. Service extrmely deep rural customers who dont have other options.
5. Service MDU's with a reverse model of 60GHz to the building, then fibre to the appt.
What actually happens in practice is that anything more complex than bouncing 5ghz off of a tower is too hard, hiring someone intelligent to do it for them is too expensive and too hard and so small wisps just sell to bigger wisps who sell to fibre carriers or go bust.