Are there really much advantages to having a T1 data line?

I think doing the WISP thing would be more trouble than it would be worth. I'm talking 5-10 years down the line when I have a house built and it's paid for. I'm not going the long term mortgage route, I'd rather just build my own house at a much lower expense. Sure, I'm going to have to serve some time working construction to build the necessary skills. That said I'm already pretty capable with building just about anything. It might not always look beautiful, but it always works.

I'm going to build some super efficient eco-friendly house, not because I'm a tree hugger per say, but because I want it to be cheap to run.

If you make $50k a year, and don't have a mortgage payment, significant car payment, spending $500 a month on a fibre line doesn't sound so crazy. It's still a bit nuts, sure, but so are the people that go for those adjustable rate mortgages. At least I'm not going to hop in that boat.

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Originally Posted by Recon

FCC is only an issue if you go above certain wattage levels, its not that hard the only real issues are tower access and having licensed tower climbers. and if your talking about for a neighborhood well then you could do it off your room im talking about full sized FM radio towers or the slightly smaller cell towers, both of which I worked on.

We dropped our WISP due to it taking away from our web design/consulting business. But it was a relativly easy business to maintain, the hardest part was finding customers and customer instillations, because there was always a Tree/watertower in exactly the wrong space.

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State, county and local licensing can be a real legal bee's hive.
One needs building permits, state and sometimes federal approvals for putting up a tower, business licenses and permits and tax permits. After that comes getting customers.

We cheated, we knew the owners of said FM station and worked a deal out with them.

My coworker leases his T3 to his neighbors via a wifi connection. He pays around $5200 a month or so for his connection.

What is even funnier is that a local isp is also leasing part of his bandwidth since he does live in a remote area of town with little or no service.

Damn lucky bugger!

I know he uses repeaters and special devices to extend his wifi a few miles.