The Challenges of Scaling WISPs

Wireless ISPs (WISPs) are one of the primary means of delivering broadband Internet access to rural and underserved areas of the world. However, WISP operators often struggle to maintain let alone grow their operations. We set out both to understand what challenges WISP operators face and to develop new approaches to help them in managing their networks. First, we present a study we conducted of operating WISPs to understand what barriers they face. Second, we describe our experiences building and using a software system for WISP management, and a new WISP we have built from the ground up using that system. We found that WISPs appear to reach natural scaling limits, and that despite excitement in the networking community about the promise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) in new environments, more mundane functionality like subscriber management provides much of the actual benefit to WISPs.