Wireless Internet Tower 1.2 Miles Away NLOS

[Buck0613]

So I moved to a relatively rural area and have been suffering using satellite internet and am sick of it. Found out there is a wireless tower 1.2 miles away. Its owned by a local company and is boasting 8mbps down and 3mbps up. Anyhow, the tower is on the other side of a small hill, but in order to get direct line of sight, my antenna would have to be probably 60foot, not in my budget at this point. Anyhow, what are my options at this point? All my neighbors have direct line of sight to the tower from their rooftops. I'd like to think that I can somehow make this connection work, what do you guys think?

 

[bill001g]

You have to have line of site the signal is very weak to start with it can easily be blocked by even a tree.

Towers are expensive but likely not as high as you think. You still have to dig a good sized hole and I would suspect a few hundred more for concrete.
http://www.texastowers.com/4-60.htm

Now this is 60ft which is a lot. A telephone pole is about 30ft. They have 30ft towers for about $400 which is a lot cheaper if you really don't need 60ft.

Both these towers are what are called tilt up a single person can put them up although the 60ft one is about the biggest you can do by yourself.

 

[Buck0613]

I have been seeing that folks are having good results with 900mhZ antennas, would this be an option or does that depend on the equipment at the ISP tower? Also, due to only having the option of satellite, my thoughts are that the ISP would have a vested interest in providing service to this area, I'm sure that this company would have to make the decision, but would it be a viable option for the company to build another tower to provide LOS to my area? Sorry for the ignorance...

Thanks for the reply btw, however that kind of cost is not in my budget at this point...

 

[bill001g]

Hard to say what they use. These type installations are referred to as WISP. They use 900 2.4g and 5g. Most have gone to 5g because there is more bandwidth.

Normally they do not use antenna in the basic sense. What they normally do is mount a radio up on top of the pole. It may be integrated with a antenna but it depends on the equipment type. Motorola canopy is one of the popular ones to use for WISP and those look like flat small boxes about a foot long and a few inches wide.

The key to them being able to provide service is a tower of some kind they can mount their equipment on. They would then use a microwave backhaul antenna to link to another tower and use the client antenna to provide service. Does not take a real lot of customers for them to recover the cost of the equipment but getting space on a tower is another story. The cell phone companies pay big bucks for space on towers so they have to compete with them even for space on water towers which is the most common WISP location.