I have been discussing with a company the prospect of setting up a community wireless network and using one of their structures to mount the AP equipment on. The structure sits to one side at roughly the midpoint of the town with a maximum of 5.5 kms to the south, 6.5 kms to the west and 4.5 kms to the north that would need coverage. There is nothing to the east. The structure is 50m in height and can be seen from almost every location in the town.
My thoughts are to use two 90-degree sectors and two non-gps connectorised epmp 1000 units to start with to see if there is much in the way of interest and go from there. The network would be closed in that there will be no internet access and I was looking at using a Mikrotik router to take care of the networking requirements.
I was hoping that some people might chime in with some advice on issues that I might run into. There is no competing wisp in town (so I guess the air would be pretty clean). We are in Australia and it is not such a big thing in this country to run wisps.
There will be no commercial aspect to this (a requirement from the company offering the space) and it will be operated as a community driven project. End users will purchase their own equipment and install themselves.