I live in Lindon Utah, a small community too small to attract capital from companies like ATT or Qwest. Consequently, my broadband choices have been pretty limited. When I worked for the State, I had an ISDN connection to the State network that was good enough. Being reasonably fast and always on, it did the job. Leaving the State forced me to get another solution and given my available options, fixed wireless was the most obvious choice.

I've shied away from wireless broadband in the past because, frankly, most of the companies are small and calling up customer support and getting a response like "I'll have Joel call you at 3:30 when he gets out of class" wasn't my idea of fun. But I used dial-up for a week and decided that anything was better than that.

I signed up with a company called ConnectBBS and got my install this morning. ConnectBBS is going around the Wasatch Front buying small wireless broadband companies and rolling them up. Probably not a bad play. The service is fair and the price reasonable. I'm getting around 220 kbs according to Bandwidth Place. They didn't get my router installed on the net correctly, but it didn't take too long when I got home to figure out and get it working.

Being interested in this sort of thing, I probably made the installer nervous by following him around and asking lots of questions. This is not a business with huge barriers to entry. After 30 minutes with this guy, I think I could set a wireless broadband network up in my neighborhood without too much trouble. Its just dirt simple. The second hardest part is knowing where to buy the equipment. The hardest part, and one which will probably make or break most of these companies, is customer service and having an infrastructure that will allow the network to be monitored, fixed, and tweaked without a lot of truck rolls. I was impressed that the customer support tech who answered my call was knowledgeable and could see what was happening on my end (like when my router finally chimed with their DHCP server and picked up an IP address).