The WISP Tower

I have several locations where we have had to make do with improvised deployments that have ranged from a big pipe in the ground with dishes on it to pulling our nice converted COW trailer to a pasture in Wyoming to establish connectivity into a town and having to leave it in place for almost a year.    The improvised setups have worked okay, but there are limits to how far you can go up in the air when you can’t put in a solid concrete base for a tower – and our COW is overkill and really too expensive and useful to have sitting in a pasture for a year.   Also, I have run into situations where a county or town expects to have a building permit pulled before putting a tower in place, even a short 30’ tower.   Which is a pain.

Over the last few months, I have been working with a local manufacturing company to design and build a heavy duty, semi-portable tower system for use in places where there is no existing infrastructure.    The idea is that we can take this unit out, deploy it in a short period of time and be able to leave it at a location indefinitely.   It also had to be stable enough to hold a 30’ tower with multiple backhaul dishes and access point antennas and simple enough that a two man crew could put it up without any special tools or equipment needed.

Our prototype unit was rushed into service in July when we had to find an alternate way to feed a town in Wyoming.   All we had available to us was a hilltop that had line of sight to the town and one of our towers which was 28 miles away.   There was no power available for miles, nearly solid rock on the top of the hill and very limited accessibility – five miles of cow trails and a very steep final incline to get to the top of the hill.    Putting in a typical tower was going to be nearly impossible, and we really needed to get 20’ of elevation to make the paths work well.    The prototype ended up working out perfectly.   It took two of us about four hours to get the tower put up, dishes and backhaul radios installed and the site fully operational on a battery pack.   It then took another four hours the next day to get a solar power plant installed and fencing put up around the site to keep curious antelope from chewing on the wires.    After three months, everything is working perfectly.

Last month, we put up the first of the production units on a hilltop in Nebraska.   We had a potential customer that was using HughesNet at home to run her good-sized consulting business and was desperate for a good Internet connection.  We couldn’t get a connection to her house from our nearest AP, but she had a hilltop on her farmland nearby that not only had a good path to two of our towers, it also had good potential as a access point location for quite a few potential customers that were shadowed from the other wireless ISPs in the area as well as the mobile operators.

The production tower went up remarkably easy.   It took us only two hours to go from unhooking the trailer from the pickup to full deployment of the 25′ tall tower with antennas mounted and wires run.   It took us another hour to get the solar panels and batteries hooked up, and another 45 minutes or so of antenna alignment, so total deployment time from start to finish was under four hours.   The first customer was installed a week later and within another ten days, all of our traffic to this town was re-routed to go through this tower because it was two hops closer to our local fiber connection in this area.

Four hours to get a broadband facility may not sound like anything special, but it is a pretty remarkable achievement.    Putting up a tower is usually a done over a period of months.   Site negotiations, power planning, tower engineering, permitting, environmental studies, ordering the hardware, pouring concrete, waiting for the concrete to cure, configuring the wireless equipment and finally installation of the facilities are all items that take a long period of time to get completed.  A typical cell tower deployment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes months.   Our WISP microcell tower was put up in a day and cost well under $10,000.   In the future, we can deploy a new broadband facility within 48 hours and start installing customers as soon as the backbone connection is established.   The portable tower is extremely low maintenance and very sturdy.   Our operational history indicates that we should only have to replace batteries once every 3-4 years.   The ability to drop a fully functional tower into place in a matter of days is a powerful weapon for a WISP to have.

I am very excited about the potential for these new tower setups.   They will make excellent microcell platforms, for clusters of customers who cannot get service from a traditional tower setup due to distance or vegetation.   Our tower in Wyoming is the endpoint of a perfect example of telco bypass – hooking up the last 35 miles of a telephone company bypass network that stretches across two states and 185 miles and provides the equivalent performance of a $4000/month DS3 connection.   Other uses for this type of tower setup include temporary installations for special events and emergency network deployments in disaster areas.

One of the biggest advantages of the fixed wireless/wisp model is flexibility and speed of deployment.   The WISP Tower is a tool that will enhance both of these features and open up many new possibilities for WISPs.