A neighborhood Internet service provider (NISP) is a small scale

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

targeted at a single subdivision or neighborhood. They are built in a

neighborhood A neighbourhood (Commonwealth English) or neighborhood (American English) is a geographically localized community within a larger town, city, suburb or rural area, sometimes consisting of a single street and the buildings lining it. Neigh ...

to provide Internet access to residents in the

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

, often using rooftop antennas in a hub-and-spoke arrangement to bridge the last few hundred feet to the residences (or possibly businesses). Such a network requires a local network engineer (often a volunteer) to maintain network integrity and monitor the

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

. There are firms that will install and maintain such a network, but there are other options. For instance, loosely knit communities across the world connect access points (which are owned by private citizens or local institutions) into

wireless mesh network A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. It can also be a form of wireless ad hoc network. Chai Keong Toh Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks, Prentice Hall Publishers, 2002. ...

s, to set up

wireless community network Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives ...

s targeted at the public.

Advantages

With the right number of subscribers a NISP can easily cost less than the traditional

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric di ...

and

cable Cable may refer to: Mechanical * Nautical cable, an assembly of three or more ropes woven against the weave of the ropes, rendering it virtually waterproof * Wire rope, a type of rope that consists of several strands of metal wire laid into a hel ...

lines. NISP offers greater speed in connectivity for larger groups of people compared to a

Wi-Fi hotspot A hotspot is a physical location where people can obtain Internet access, typically using Wi-Fi technology, via a wireless local-area network (WLAN) using a router connected to an Internet service provider. Public hotspots may be created by ...

but at a cheaper price than wireless community network. NISP can use software such as P2P (

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

) in order to function efficiently with high performance neighbors. This can lead to the greatest amount of bandwidth being used by all. At the same time traffic can be kept within the network.

Disadvantages

There are some legal disadvantages to having an NISP. For example, if the Internet connection being provided is secured by only one username and

password A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services t ...

, this makes the connection less secure since more than a few people have access. Another disadvantage is if a person has a stronger wi-fi transmitter they can use a particular frequency even if it causes the other neighbors connection to weaken.

Alternate options

In smaller areas it can be beneficial to use Wi-Fi Hot Spots since it can provide more security, fewer legal repercussions, and cheaper and faster connectivity. For bigger groups it can be beneficial to use a

wireless Internet service provider A wireless Internet service provider (WISP) is an Internet service provider with a network based on wireless networking. Technology may include commonplace Wi-Fi wireless mesh networking, or proprietary equipment designed to operate over open ...

instead.

References

{{reflist

External links

Internet Comparison
Internet service providers

Advantages

Disadvantages

Alternate options

See also

References

External links