Currently I'm on 2mb wireless service which was the fastest I could get. Lots of promises of something faster coming "soon". There's always something coming "soon" that never seems to materialize.
Undercapitalized. If you can make a 2Mb microwave shot work, it'll easily do 10. Just have to upgrade the last mile gear and, of course, the backhaul gear and speeds. Even the ancient old Redline backhaul gear would do 45 Mb/s which if you aren't over-subscribing too badly will easily service multiple customers.
Our provider is the "competitor" to another wireless company that a friend built. We've played a lot with the gear. He had the west suburbs and mountain areas, they had the north suburbs and on up into northern Colorado. Both were bought up by Nebraska investors along with a similar group of companies in Texas and all renamed to Rise Broadband.
You need some bored Nebraska investors to buy your provider. Heh. The sale made my friend some decent money too. He got out of the biz. Too many crap weather days climbing towers to restore service. Bought a security alarm company instead.
Since the influx of cash the new company lost all their clueful front line tech support but their field folks are still good and the gear is all continuously but very slowly upgraded.
Currently at 10/2 with a 200 GB cap which isn't bad. Additional bandwidth above 200 GB is charged at $3.50/10 GB which is also pretty fair.
Cellular would work out here on some carriers, but you hit the nail on the head on the cap problem. Can't get anywhere close to 200 GB cap from any of them. Well, Sprint has some rate limited business class stuff that's "unlimited" but is forced to 3G speeds and to get that would be about $120/mo out here plus you'd need to aim a yagi toward one of three far away towers and have a booster on premesis.
There's exactly one tower with the visibility to shoot back into town and hit someplace with big speeds on site, and then shoot to our place. Only the top 15' of it is visible from over the ridgeline.
Problem is, it's run by a local power company and they're not renting space. They don't want anyone on it, which is a shame, because I'd happily go get the backhaul gear and make the shot to town from it and put some panels up there for a competitive service or even a private system, and pay them tower rent to do it. Could even hire bonded and insured climbing crew to install it if that's what they wanted. But their answer is "no", always.
So we use the wireless company and they're hopping through one of the neighbor's houses to the south to get to the best commercial tower site about six miles away.
Will be interesting to see what I can see from the top of my tower once I get it up. There's a chance it could shoot to a mountain site west of Denver. If it could, the service providers have both expressed interest in hanging gear on it, but it's a crank over and I don't think they'll appreciate me taking it down to service the HF antennas. Haha. So I'd have to put up another fixed one next to the fold over.
