Wisper ISP Deploys Mimosa for Bigger Bandwidth, Massive Throughput!

Wisper ISP is a leading provider of wireless Internet and VoIP services, serving more than 8,000 business and residential customers in the Great- er St. Louis and Southern Illinois areas. Named one of the “Top 20 Small Businesses in St. Louis” by Small Business Monthly, 2014, Wisper prides itself on its superb 96% customer satisfaction rating.

Wisper ISP was one of Mimosa’s first B5 Backhaul adopters. The Wisper team used Mimosa’s B5 to connect a community near St. Louis, MO. The link originates at a fiber-fed tower with a 1 Gbps connection, and serves a community of 500-600 customers.

How do we increase our bandwidth?

Previously, Wisper was using PtP 600 Cambium products for a 3.5 mile, 30 MHz link and receiving 96 Mbps of download throughput. “As our demand grew in this area, we began to max out on bandwidth but had no additional 5 GHz spectrum for use.

“If you have ever done an upgrade like this before you know that it is very difficult. The B5’s GPS capabilities are a game changer, however, allowing us to do much more than ever before with the spectrum we have available.”

We began to explore additional options to upgrade bandwidth on this link,” said Wisper ISP CEO, Nathan Stooke. “We were excited to deploy the new Mimosa B5 product in this challenging environment.”

Mimosa B5 Backhaul to the rescue!

One of the advantages of using the Mimosa product was the ability to use the lesser occupied 5.1 GHz band in an area with very limited 5.4 GHz spectrum availability. Wisper used the lower 5.1 GHz band, leveraging only 40 MHz (in a 2x20 channel split) and was able to improve speeds from 96 Mbps to 220 Mbps download.

“The install went very smoothly, the online registration set-up keeps things very simple and nice. It is a different method of installing a product, but that is what I like about it, said Wisper CEO, Nathan Stooke, “Overall, it is a very light radio – we didn’t need any roping or rigging and it was very easy to align and fine tune.” According to Wisper, they have the opportunity to increase channel size even more if necessary, but they have a policy to only use the minimum amount of spectrum required to serve an area.

Conclusion

Wisper ISP plans to use the B5 on a tower in another location that is also extremely constrained in spectrum availability. In order to upgrade capacity on this tower, five separate links all need to be upgraded at once and replaced with collocated B5s. “If you have ever done an upgrade like this before you know that it is very difficult. The B5’s GPS capabilities are a game changer, however, allowing us to do much more than ever before with the spectrum we have available,” said Stooke.

Upgrading this link with a B5 will leverage the massive spectrum re-use capability that the B5 brings with its GPS/GLONASS synchronization and advanced radio isolation.

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