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The Challenges of Scaling WISPs

Published: 01 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DEV '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computing for Development
    December 2015
    186 pages
    ISBN:9781450334907
    DOI:10.1145/2830629
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 01 December 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. network operations
    2. rural
    3. wireless

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    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • Google.org
    • NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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    ACM DEV '15
    Sponsor:
    ACM DEV '15: Annual Symposium on Computing for Development
    December 1 - 2, 2015
    London, United Kingdom

    Acceptance Rates

    DEV '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 50 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 52 of 164 submissions, 32%

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    • (2024)ElasticWISP-NG: Towards Dynamic Resource Provisioning for WISP Access NetworksAdvanced Information Networking and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-57840-3_6(55-66)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2024
    • (2023)Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks with MagmaGetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications10.1145/3631588.363159927:3(40-47)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Reconsidering Network Management Interfaces for CommunitiesProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3629050(162-169)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
    • (2023)How I Learned to Stop Worrying About CCA ContentionProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628204(229-237)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
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    • (2022)Dynamic Packet Duplication for Industrial URLLCSensors10.3390/s2202058722:2(587)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2022
    • (2022)A Realistic Open-Data-based Cost Model for Wireless Backhaul Networks in Rural Areas2022 18th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM)10.23919/CNSM55787.2022.9964562(55-63)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Situating Network Infrastructure with People, Practices, and Beyond: A Community Building WorkshopCompanion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3500868.3560716(267-272)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022
    • (2021)Whale Watching in Inland Indonesia: Analyzing a Small, Remote, Internet-Based Community Cellular NetworkProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3449996(1483-1494)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
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