Came here to say this. Commit confirmed is the best.

Also, all the poll options suck, consumer grade routers are crap.

Love my SRX100. :-P

And then, in all seriousness.

Deploy Juniper products where you can. Commit confirmed alone will help keep you sane.

As for learning how this stuff all glues together and works, that really depends on how you learn. I learn by trying things, and reading the manual, not from a classroom. YMMV, but I have never seen a class that did anything short of an awful job of explaining how networking works. I rely heavily on my peers and Google for ironing out issues that I cannot solve in my lab. Consider attending talks on subjects relevant to your needs, and anything that sounds even remotely interesting. Find someone more skilled than you who can explain shit in your native tongue and attempt to osmosis some talent bit by bit. Oh, and get yourself an O'Reilly Safari subscription, a nook/kindle/whatever, and start, as my friend Jeff says, consuming massive quantities of text.

And seriously, consider running, you are in for a long, dark road of evil.

Run, run as fast as you can, and don't look back.

Motorola's Canopy line was originally developed as a cellular technology (that never took off), and shares more in common with GSM and CDMA than it does 802.11. Not all wireless internet is 802.11, or even close.

And it isn't outdoor use that makes 802.11 crappy, its the long range, blind neighbor problems (as you mentioned), and the ability of any one client to basically monopolize 90% of the capacity of an AP. Oh, and the crappy subset of the 2.4 ghz spectrum is no picnic either.

I do this for a living, 802.11 wisps do not work. I don't care how many tweaks you apply to it, they always hit a critical mass of customers.

The guy who posted this is on the WISPA mailing list was scrambling to deal with a slashdotting a day before this made the front page. Its hosted off his network, and he keeps paying that host more and more for bandwidth and whatnot, because most WISPS have a DS3 or two as upstream, were all just that small.

You don't want service from an 802.11 WISP, 802.11 signaling is great for carrying your laptop around your house, absolutely SUCKS wind when deployed for point to multi point last mile applications.

The Cadillac gear for wisps is Canopy or Alvarion. Both can deliver cable modem, and better speeds, for hundreds of subbies per access point, without degrading performance for all your neighbors. 802.11 wisps tend to be the ultra cheap shops, with the owners doing everything to make a quick buck.

No, please don't do this. Don't set yourself up a crappy 802.11 2.4ghz noise factory and call yourself a wisp just to get free internet in the boonies. It is a lot harder than you think, it is a full time job, and if you aren't going to do it full time, all you are really achieving is creating even more noise in the part-15 spectrum.

Not all WISPS are members of WISPA either, they may not even be aware of this map. It just appeared on the mailing list a few days ago. WISPA is awesome, great bunch of people, WISPS from Texas helping guys in Michigan out, we exchange ideas on mailing lists, send each other emergency parts when lightning kicks our asses inside out.

I should dig up my, "I work for a WISP, and please, don't give ANY ISPs money" rant. The stimulus package is fucking stupid. The DSL and Cable providers want money, have received money in the past, and have never done anything to extend coverage with it. All us little WISPS are screaming for spectrum, which we believe will be our great equalizer. We don't want money, let our quality service decide how much money we have, its called capitalism.

The big providers do not see a market in rural America. Giving them a ton of money isn't going to change that. I, and my fellow wisps, see great potential, and we are not asking for a dime to help us achieve it. Just give us some spectrum so we can get out of this part-15 roach motel we are forced to operate in right now.

Part-15, look it up. Basically, the crappiest part of the airwaves that no one with tons of money wanted for anything, set aside for public use.

See? This is why people who have no clue how something works, shouldn't be allowed to generate policy. You don't even understand how DSL works. But you just KNOW the answer, don't you?

You can't just magically "upgrade the lines" for DSL, the limiting factor of DSL availability is distance from the central office(CO). If you are too far away, sometimes called "being beyond the DSL line", you can attach the line to a DSLAM at the CO, and slap an ADSL modem at the customer's house, and watch it never work all you want. No government mandate is going to fix that. Fringe customers are basically anyone past ~16,000 feet. AT&T has rolled out a 512k/64k service in the area for customers approaching 20,000 feet. Yeah, how do you reach longer with DSL? Make it suck more.

Have a friend, bought a house in the trees, so I can't even help him with 900 mhz(about half my top speed, but can go through some obstruction, yes I work for a WISP. Loop length is 19,000 feet, he gets.... 384k/64k, and regular spikes in latency.

Oh, and building a CO out in the boonies with even a small switch, and its own DSLAM.... yeah, your big LECs won't lose money on that waste of time, they have a history of sidestepping government mandated policies in negative profit areas by selling their coverage to some ultra low budget phone company, who cuts costs by having zero customer support. Why does everyone think that giving them all a ton of money, and saying, "you have to give DSL to anyone who asks" will make them behave any differently? They will sell out of the market to a small bastard company who wasn't in the legislation, and isn't required to sell DSL. They have done this shit before, and they will continue to do this shit. Wow, I got way off track, this issue annoys the piss out of me.

DSL is a cheap hack of a technology, its time to look elsewhere for answers.