I have two locations in Texas using rural internet delivery, one is 60$ per month. The other is 125$ a month. One site is less than a mile from the tower, the other is 17.7 miles from the tower. The one costing 125$ a month get heavy use, close to a TB per month, and is rock solid, and a good company, never any drops or "netflix" hour slowdowns. The 60$ a month is owned by a national rural carrier, and is the closer to the tower, it experiences overloading, downtime etc. It is obvious the backhaul is not enough. Honestly I prefer paying more for reliability. BTW they both use the same equipment, but I did pay for my own equipment with the more expensive one, and did opt for a licensed band transceiver. Cant say enough for a good company www.ranchwireless.com verses www.risebroadband.com

Our products are not for consumers. Our products are super expensive, pretty much 10 times COT's. The required manufacturing Flow Control Documents, Quality Control Documents, Identification Documents, recording of all of the above on paper, and proper filings makes up 90% of the cost of the parts.
Documentation of API requires changes from both our company and customer, so you even need a little wag of that cost to add into the part. Or in some cases, where our customer likes to change all of the above, its about 5K every time they want to change anything before the next build.

Otherwise for COTS having available online PDF of your language flavor I think is preferred.

So ya go ahead and skip the 25% and 50% test, just flip that big switch for me will ya already!

Maybe he should watch Rocket Farmer once or twice. Or maybe he's been watching it to much..

I agree, 62 doing what I like, yes still working, coding, designing, mentoring, and proud to build important products. I can walk in a walmart and point out products I have touched, you have phones with sensors I have touched. Space shuttle has parts I have built by hand, the newest airplanes both commercial and military fly with products I got to help design, build, test and deliver. Write in many old languages :) assembler, C, VB, or what ever is best for the project.

Played with web stuff, found it boring. Prefer different path, and am enjoying it. Not rich enough to buy a large farm, but have a few acres, and enjoy that too!

Einstein was right,
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."

Sad I am getting so old it hurts to flail my arms like that any more. Post little but still read daily.

Why not just buy like a transistor radio with solar cell charging, their very cheep. Where's my Swiss knife pop out of my Iphone, that would be more useful.

No internal antenna.

It is not a crash at all....
Just an 'rapid unscheduled disassembly'

That should have been a comment to https://slashdot.org/story/17/...

Using a self setup vpn in a data server that does not gather you data is what I am doing. Its not that I care that the government gets it, its I don't need Comcast, Verizon, Tmobile or other service provider that I am SURE will sell my browser data. I do quite a bit of research on our products, and even at work they use comcast! I do not know if management realizes the trove of data that comes from this. Maybe someday they will wake up.

I also use my server for transferring large files to my customers using opencloud. Do not want dropbox getting access to things they have no business seeing. But sales uses Dropbox on a regular basis. Sigh...

Am I just getting old and err.. paranoid?

I currently run a openvpn server, and think I will now spin one up on digitalocean for 10$ a month, for my family anyways, this stuff just makes me sick and tired.

Typical oversubscription ratios pre Netflix and YouTube era was around 20 to 1 now your lucky to do 7 to 1 in the wireless isp world. So ya fiber to POP will be necessary in the very near future. I would like to see some improvements in the regulation area for smaller players to be able to enter. This would help in the last mile approach and allow more bandwidth per user

I have very recently looked at becoming a isp. Cogent will work with Small ISPs, hundred megabit connection is around $325 per month and a one gigabit connection is around $1200 per month. My intention was to bring it out via wireless and that Equipment is easy to figure out and do the problem is that it ended up being around $1500 a month to get roof rights to get the darn data out from a carrier center which was only 100 yards from my first POP.

The capex "capital expenditures" you can expect to be around 7 to 30K depending on number of initial customers. But in this case my opex " "operational expenses" were to great. You will see in my case I would have to have around 50 customers to break even, and that's just offering 20 meg service. To get where you could start making a real wage and take a day off you have to reach 500 customers. So if your ever really thinking about doing this stuff do some real research.