Last week, we wrote about a wireless Internet service provider called Webpass that sells 500Mbps upload and download speeds for just $55 a month.

That service is only available for businesses and multi-unit residential buildings in big cities because it wouldn’t be financially feasible to bring it out to the suburbs and single-family homes.

But there’s another wireless Internet service provider that is bringing pretty fast Internet—100Mbps upload and download for $60 a month—to single-family homes. The company, Vivint, makes home security and automation technology as well as rooftop solar panels, but it expanded into broadband after customers practically begged for it.

The company’s door-to-door sales force “got consistent feedback from customers asking, ‘Do you happen to offer Internet?’ People are dissatisfied with their ISP in many places,” Vivint Wireless General Manager Luke Langford told Ars this week.

The company began offering Internet service near its headquarters in Provo, Utah in early 2013, expanded to El Paso, Texas in October, 2014, and then to San Antonio, Texas in April of this year. Vivint has 15,000 subscribers in the cities and surrounding suburbs and is planning for expansion.

Each neighborhood has a "hub home" that gets free service in exchange for hosting the rooftop equipment needed to serve neighbors. Vivint also offers VoIP phone service for $14.99 a month and partners with DirecTV to complete the “triple-play” bundle. There are no data caps or overage charges.

“We are working actively to add two or three more cities this year and twice that number next year,” Langford said. Vivint says it “researches and identifies markets where customers are consistently underserved by the competition with poor customer service, slow Internet speeds and lack of investment in infrastructure upgrades.”

Network frustrations

Despite the advertised speeds and prices, switching to Vivint isn’t a slam-dunk choice. The company has gotten numerous bad reviews from customers describing outages, slower-than-promised speeds, and inadequate customer service responses.

An August 2014 review at Pissed Consumer has generated about 20 such comments, including some this month. There’s a similar discussion at a personal blog called “I’mASuper.”

“I have been without Internet for a week. The radio signal is getting blocked by all the trees that have recently bloomed. How did they not foresee this? Very frustrated,” one “Pissed Consumer” reviewer wrote last month.

Another customer who signed up for Vivint in Utah last month wrote that Internet connectivity went out for one week beginning on May 27 and then again in mid-June. Yet another customer is switching back to Time Warner Cable.

To be fair, all ISPs will have occasional outages and angry customers. Some of Vivint’s satisfied customers have described their experiences on reddit.

Langford discussed the complaints with us. Some outages are outside the company’s control; about a month ago, a fiber line to a data center got cut during a construction project, taking out Vivint and other ISPs in Utah for about eight hours, he said.

But in other cases, outages and slow speeds were caused by shortcomings in early versions of Vivint’s technology, he said. Vivint’s latest equipment upgrades should make a big difference; for example, he said the company’s newer radios are better able to penetrate trees.

The upgrades began in March and are continuing over the summer. Though this should make things better, Vivint will still let customers out of the two-year contracts they have to sign when technicians can’t solve their problems, Langford said.

“We do not want to hold people to a service that sucks,” he said.

Vivint’s architecture

While the Webpass model uses point-to-point wireless, Vivint instead uses point-to-multi-point, similar to cellular networks and the rural wireless Internet providers that connect homes in far-flung areas.

The company has its own network architecture, though, which it honed through trial and error.

Vivint uses licensed spectrum, mostly in the 28GHz range, to send its signals from fiber-connected towers and high buildings to residential neighborhoods. Those signals travel several miles and are then picked up by equipment on top of “hub homes,” which distribute Internet service to their neighbors. Each tower has somewhere between 1Gbps and 10Gbps of bandwidth, and up to 128 hub homes can connect to a single tower, depending on tower space, spectrum availability, and fiber capacity.

A hub home has three antennas on its roof. One connects back to the tower and the other two are access points that use 5GHz Wi-Fi airwaves to serve broadband to up to 24 homes within a 1,000-foot radius. Each access point has a 180-degree radiation pattern.

A hub home is a home “that we identify as being one that would be a good hub for that neighborhood,” Langford said. “We approach that homeowner and we say, ‘Would you like free, fast Internet forever?’”

Using licensed spectrum helps Vivint get signals to neighborhoods without interference, Langford said. While the 5GHz band used to create networks within neighborhoods is unlicensed, meaning anyone can use it, Vivint designed its own proprietary radios and software to distribute a good signal that can withstand stormy weather.

The wireless ISP equipment readily available from vendors didn’t work for Vivint’s model, Langford said. It was either too expensive, making it unsuitable for delivering reasonably priced service to single-family homes, or too slow.

“Most other wireless ISPs that service suburban America have a model where they have a tower and shoot right to end customer homes, a distance of 1, 2, 3, 10 miles,” Langford said. “The beam width in the antenna configuration that is required to do that is very different than when I'm trying to get a 180-degree coverage pattern in a residential neighborhood and only go 1,000 feet and optimize for 100Mbps per second on fewer clients. There are a lot of dials you turn in software; there are a lot of dials you turn in the actual enclosure design and the design of the antenna that works with the different components on the board to make that effective.”

Vivint’s network has gone through a few iterations. In an earlier version, the 5GHz signals traveled further because there were two layers of “hub homes." The licensed spectrum would distribute bandwidth to a “macro hub,” which would then use 5GHz airwaves to connect to a few “micro hubs.” The macro hub was another link in the chain that could fail or degrade service.

Besides eliminating the second layer of hub homes, Vivint’s newer hub home antennas are directional rather than omnidirectional, providing better signal strength. These upgrades and the 100Mbps speeds are available throughout Vivint’s San Antonio territory, but there are still significant parts of Utah and El Paso where Vivint homes rely on older technology and get up to 50Mbps instead of 100Mbps.

Langford said he’s confident that the new equipment will make Vivint service a lot more reliable in the long run.

With Vivint’s current equipment, a single hub home provides a total of 300Mbps upload and download speeds to the surrounding houses. The network is oversubscribed just as many wired networks are, but “we ensure we have significantly more capacity than the average user is using at peak hours,” Langford said. “In our experience, the average Internet user on our network is using less than 2Mbps. You may be using more, but not everyone in the neighborhood is on at the exact same moment.”

Even during peak evening usage hours, customers can generally get close to their maximum speeds, according to Langford. “If I were to show you survey data of customers who run speed tests at peak hours, it's almost 100Mbps upload and download,” he said.

Vivint’s latest rooftop equipment still uses the older 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, but a future upgrade to 802.11ac will boost reliability and perhaps speed as well.

802.11ac “may be something we use for speed increases; it may also be something we just use to ensure more consistent service with multi-user MIMO, being able to offer simultaneous speeds to more customers,” Langford said.

Though the antennas on hub home roofs use 802.11n, Vivint supplies 802.11ac routers to customers for their in-home wireless networks. Customers can use their own routers if they wish.

New rules aren’t hampering Vivint investment

A Vivint hub home could technically offer service to locations more than 1,000 feet away and to more than 24 homes, but that would reduce speed and reliability. It also makes Vivint’s current model unsuitable for rural towns where homes are further away from each other.

Within the cities and suburbs that Vivint serves, there are limitations. The network relies on line-of-sight connections, so it can withstand a certain amount of trees but not too many.

“If there's several particularly tall houses and really dense tree coverage between someone and the hub home, we will sometimes have the installer go out and tell the customer, ‘I'm sorry, we can't provide service to you. You wouldn't be happy with it and we wouldn't be happy giving it to you,’” Langford said.

This also means Vivint has to be selective about which markets to enter.

“There are some cities, particularly on the East Coast, maybe the south, with very mature, 100-year-old, 80-foot-tall trees that limit our ability to see into a neighborhood,” Langford said. “We can still deploy in a metro area; we just can't necessarily cover all the parts where consumers would like us to.”

But the planned expansion to new cities, which haven't been revealed yet, will continue.

One thing that isn't preventing Vivint from investing is the Federal Communications Commission's decision to enforce net neutrality rules and Title II common carrier regulations. While big ISPs have claimed that the end of the world is nigh because of these new rules, Langford said, "We don't do any of the things and we didn't do any of the things that are now prohibited. Our business model was not based on extorting the Netflixes of the world to use our network. If that’s not allowed anymore, that’s fine—we weren't doing it anyway."

UPDATE: Commenters asked what qualifications hub homes have to meet and whether there is a significant electricity cost for homeowners who allow installation of hub equipment. Not surprisingly, Vivint told us that hub homes are generally taller than other homes, located centrally in a neighborhood, and can "see" a tower in order to establish a line-of-sight connection.

As for power costs, Vivint said, "Our radios are low power, and together, the equipment at the hub home draws about 75 watts. The radios are on all of the time, so the hub home does see their power bill go up by about the cost of leaving a 75 watt light bulb on all of the time. We tell them to expect about a $5-7 dollar jump in their power bill. Vivint does not cover this. We expect hub homeowners to cover in exchange for the otherwise free, 100Mbps internet service they receive."