Too many small WISPs focused on residential business only, and struggled to make any money. So ERF acquires good WISPs in the areas Cubley targets, gaining equipment and expertise in remote areas. That's also brought the company about 10,000 WISP customers it continues to service along with banks and oil and gas facilities that need data connections.
If you have a regional bank in the Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana area, ERF may be able to cut your costs and make you money. If you have some wireless installations servicing one type of business, you might modify ERF's business model for your own WISP world. After all, a wireless network doesn't care what data from how many companies runs across it.
While WISPs are great for covering hundreds of miles, sometimes you just need your Wi-Fi to go a few hundred more feet. Longer antennas help, along with mounting wireless access points higher to improve their reach. But when you need a flying saucer of Wi-Fi wonder, check out Xirrus.
I saw a Xirrus Wi-Fi Array at the ITEC show in Charlotte. The company offers a high-end, high performance Wi-Fi access point that includes up to 16 radios in a single enclosure, all tuned with radio wave guides for better distance. Xirrus claims twice the range, four times the coverage, and eight times more bandwidth than typical wireless access points, even the expensive ones sold to large companies.
Even better, it has a management system to control and monitor up to hundreds of Arrays (that's a lot of wireless). It also offers weatherproof enclosures for Arrays, allowing one outdoor Array to support large open areas of a campus, for instance.
The tech I spoke to said he was going to put up a temporary network using a single Array to support 800 students taking an LSAT (Law School Admission Test). If Xirrus can do that, it can handle whatever large wireless groups you need to support.
There you go, two wonders of wireless without mentioning the long-hyped and long-delayed WiMAX. Now you can reach farther and even use your wireless network to pay for itself.