Commenters note to editor's note: If they were paying $1800/month to run the thing, they should have been giving out customer support for those kinds of numbers! Somebody had a sweet gig there.

I am paying $120.00 a mo. for an 802.11b feed from an OC3 backbone to my hotspot. We had to throttle it down to 4 Megs because of a buffer overflow problem that shut off the service for a min or two. So far it has been fine for the past few months.
I am paying $399.00 for a 2meg 900mhz link that is fantastic. Ya know the good stuff. Carrier grade equipment, (Long Time Between Failures, Wide temperature range.) Rain, Sleet, Snow, Thunderstorms, or Sunspots do not affect it.
Sounds like they got Ripped Off, or some one did not do their homework.

But who gets paid to answer the phone when a customer calls and asks how to configure their wireless laptop to connect to the hotspot? Then it turns out that they don't even have a wireless card in their computer! Just had a customer on a Jitney using their wireless laptop for the first time ever, and had to walk them through setup. Customer support costs money and time. Trust me, I know.

And $80/month X number of spots...unless it's a mesh with a single backhaul or multiple zones backhauled to uplink with point to point wireless.

Pretty soon, your're talking about real money.

[Editor's note: First, customer service is typically not included in free wireless zones. Second, it could be outsourced as a fixed low monthly rate and a per-incident price. Third, the hotzone in question (read the links) isn't huge.--gf]

$1800 a month isn't bad. Remember that bandwidth isn't free. $1800 for a frac T3 is reasonable, though I'm sure it would probably had done better with $500 a month for two T1s.

[Editor's note: Surely the level of usage they were anticipating didn't require T1 service. 6 Mpbs/768 Kbps DSL is reliable and can be offered with service guarantees for as little as $80 per month.--gf]