There's 3 small independent WISPs in kittitas county in addition to Charter cable in Ellensburg, and whatever Consolidated (the ILEC phone company) is doing. Definitely some more rural parts of kittitas the only thing you can get is a consumer-grade vsat terminal, but those are really quite small amounts of population.
For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it.
If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people.
If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin.
If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT.
Are WISPs really a viable broadband option? The pricing vs data caps that you get are pretty ridiculous, especially for rural customers
And yes I do know people who have had problems in these counties. I also had an absolutely miserable experience using Charter due to their poor infrastructure in the valley. Internet on nights, weekends, holidays, etc. was unusable due to their high utilization of low bandwidth lines
FCC official broadband number is 25Mbs per household. I, personally, think a good number is whatever is enough to sustain productivity, entertainment, and education - so about 5 down/2 up a person (obviously, more is better).
In a household with 5 people, that is 25/10, which does fit into the FCC's definition.
WISPs are popping up left and right that can do 1000/1000 per access point, which can be shared with all customers within about a 500ft radius. That's definitely doable with the above definiton of broadband. Basically, it's one wifi-based access point that has a uplink, and each household has an externally mounted wifi antenna that then redistributes to a conventional home router.
On the other hand, I personally have a WISP in a dense urban area. I pay $45~/mo for guaranteed 100/100 - usually, my sustained speeds are closer to 200/200, or 300/300. It's an antenna on our building that is the backhaul for about 50 households.
WISPs are viable in rural areas - they bring broadband to those who can't get it.
WISPs are viable in urban areas - regions where installing new copper or fiber would be prohibitively expensive, they allow upstarts to challenge the duopoly.
Just about the only awkward middle ground where the economics get a little tough is in spread suburban areas.
maybe! I video conferenced on 1.5up for a week and I did have to turn down send quality, but other than that, it was fine.
I think the bigger issue is that if you can only get 1.5 in 2020, then that means that the physical layer between you and the internet is tenuous. Like, DSL far away from the DSLAM and thus packet loss and line noise.
I worked from home for years on a 2mps symmetric link from a wireless ISP in Tanzania, video conferencing worked well enough (Google Hangouts or whatever it was called 5 years ago).
For the heavy uploads I usually resorted to doing the upload from a VPS instead though, when possible (build the artifacts from that VPS, so that both the build and upload are much faster).
They absolutely are if implemented with the right technology and some degree of network engineeeing acumen. One wisp I know in kittitas is selling 50Mbps down x 15Mbps up with no data caps or quotas.
There are also a lot of crappy WISPs out there, so this is by no means definitive. Same as there's lots of crappy frontier copper wireline 5Mbps ADSL2+ still out there on degraded copper lines from 40 years ago.
Lol, ah Frontier. I have friends in the valley who used to work for them, great horror stories. What is the name of this kittitas WISP? I have long since moved out of the valley, but can pass this on to my family who still deal with horrendous providers.
For okanogan, Google NCI datacom, they're a wisp that covers much of the county. But not out to the fringes. Okanogan county itself and the PUD have fiber along the highway all the way from Brewster to the Canadian border, with POPs in the towns along the way. Several WISPs make use of it.
If you were using either of those counties as an example because you actually know people who are finding it difficult to get last-mile broadband, let me know and perhaps I can help put them in touch with the right people.
If we were going to use a very rural Washington State location as an example of where starlink might do well, somewhere such as people who live on acreages outside of Republic might be a better example. Or somewhere like Stehekin.
If I had to guess, the reason why Washington state is a good test market for them, is a combination of relatively low cost and easy to provision lit transport services they can buy from each earth station back to Seattle, reasonable driving times and hassle for people to come and go from the Redmond facility to the test sites for physical install and modification of equipment, and a fairly good sized base of consumers in very rural locations presently dependent on hughesnet/wildblue type cheap consumer VSAT.