How it works
How fixed-wireless internet actually works.
We mount a small directional dish on your roof and aim it at one of our mountaintop towers — like the access point on Mount Miguel. The tower beams licensed radio signal directly to your dish, the dish hands off wired Ethernet into your house, and you get internet that doesn't share the cellular network with anyone's phone.
The path your signal takes
From a mountaintop to your roof, in one hop.
A real example: a customer in Jamul connects to our access point on top of Mount Miguel — the prominent peak south of San Diego that you can see from most of East County. The signal travels straight from the tower to the dish on your roof, then runs as wired Ethernet into your router. No cell tower in the middle. No shared 5G network.
The four pieces, and what each does.
1. The tower
We site our equipment on tall structures with a clear view of the neighborhoods we serve — Mount Miguel, Mount San Miguel, Otay Mountain, and others across the county. The tower is the anchor: high elevation, redundant power, fiber backhaul to the rest of the internet.
2. The access point
A carrier-grade radio mounted on the tower, pointed across a slice of coverage area (a "sector"). It uses MU-MIMO and beamforming to talk to many subscribers at once on licensed or lightly-licensed spectrum — not the public Wi-Fi or cellular bands.
3. The subscriber dish (your roof)
Our installer mounts a small directional dish — about the size of a dinner plate — on your roof and physically aims it at the access point. Aiming matters: a clean line of sight and tight aim is what gets you a strong, stable link. We tune it on site and verify the signal-to-noise ratio before we leave.
4. The handoff inside your home
From the dish, a single shielded Ethernet cable runs into the house and plugs into your router. That's it. Power-over-Ethernet runs the dish, so there's no second power cable on the roof. Your existing Wi-Fi router takes it from there.
Total install time on a standard residential job: roughly 90 minutes to two hours. We confirm line-of-sight first; if your roof can't see the tower (heavy tree cover, neighboring building, bad angle), we tell you up front instead of guessing.
The key idea
Your dish only talks to our tower. That's the whole game.
Cellular networks — including 5G home internet — are built for mobility. A phone has to roam between towers, share airtime with thousands of devices, and bend the signal around buildings and bodies. That flexibility costs capacity, and it's why 5G home internet speed varies wildly by hour.
Fixed wireless throws all of that away. Your dish doesn't move. It only talks to one access point. The link is engineered once, aimed once, and stays put. That's how a small radio on a roof in Jamul can hold a steady 100–300 Mbps to a tower miles away across the valley, even on a busy Friday night.
The long story
A short history of the radio waves under your internet.
The technology delivering your internet today rests on more than a century of radio engineering. A quick tour of how we got here helps explain why fixed wireless is suddenly so much better than it used to be.
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1
1888 – 1901 · Hertz, Marconi, the spark gap
Radio waves stop being theory.
Heinrich Hertz proved in 1888 that the electromagnetic waves Maxwell had predicted on paper actually existed. Within a decade Guglielmo Marconi was sending Morse code across the Atlantic. The notion that information could ride on an invisible wave was now an engineering problem, not a physics question.
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2
1940s · WWII radar
The microwave era starts in a war.
Wartime radar pushed engineers up into the GHz range — microwave frequencies short enough to bounce off aircraft. Klystrons, magnetrons, and waveguides came out of that decade and went on to underpin every microwave point-to-point link in use today, including ours.
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3
1971 · ALOHAnet
The first wireless packet network.
Norman Abramson and his team at the University of Hawaii built ALOHAnet, a packet-switched radio network that linked the islands together at 9.6 kbps. The "ALOHA protocol" — talk whenever you want, retry on collision — directly shaped Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and every modern radio MAC layer. This is the first time the internet, properly speaking, traveled by air.
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4
1985 · The unlicensed bands open
The FCC frees 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.8 GHz.
The FCC opened the "ISM" (industrial, scientific, medical) bands for unlicensed use as long as you used spread-spectrum modulation. That single decision is the soil every Wi-Fi router, cordless phone, Bluetooth headset, and early WISP grew out of. No license fee, no government permission per device — just play nice with the noise.
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5
1997 · 802.11
Wi-Fi gets a name.
IEEE published the first 802.11 standard at 2 Mbps. Two years later 802.11b hit 11 Mbps and Wi-Fi was suddenly in laptops. By the early 2000s, small operators across rural America were bolting cheap 802.11 radios onto grain silos and water towers and calling themselves WISPs — the wireless ISP movement that we're a direct descendant of.
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6
2008 – 2015 · OFDM, MIMO, beamforming
Wireless gets serious about capacity.
OFDM split a single channel into hundreds of narrow tones, dramatically improving resilience to interference. MIMO let a single radio talk over multiple antennas at once. Beamforming let a tower aim its energy at the subscriber instead of broadcasting in every direction. Together, these are why a 2025 fixed-wireless link looks nothing like a 2005 one.
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7
2020 · CBRS goes live
3.5 GHz becomes the workhorse for fixed wireless.
The Citizens Broadband Radio Service opened up 150 MHz of "lightly licensed" 3.5 GHz spectrum to operators who agreed to share it dynamically through a Spectrum Access System. CBRS is what made carrier-grade fixed wireless economical for ISPs at our scale — a quiet, well-engineered band that doesn't fight Wi-Fi for elbow room.
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8
Today
Fiber-grade speeds across a valley, on a roof-mounted dish.
Modern fixed-wireless gear pulls together everything above: GHz-range microwave, OFDMA, MU-MIMO, beamforming, and licensed or shared spectrum. The result is a residential link that delivers 50–300 Mbps to a small dish miles from the tower — a feat that would have seemed absurd to a WISP operator in 2005.
Why the frequency band matters.
Different chunks of the radio spectrum behave very differently. Lower frequencies travel farther and bend around obstacles but carry less data. Higher frequencies carry massive amounts of data but punch through almost nothing. Picking the right band for the job is most of what makes a wireless network actually work.
| Band | Range | Capacity | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 900 MHz | Very long, bends around hills | Low | Rural backhaul, IoT |
| 2.4 GHz | Long, decent obstacle penetration | Medium · very crowded | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microwave ovens |
| 3.5 GHz (CBRS) | Long, near line-of-sight | High · lightly licensed, quiet | Carrier-grade fixed wireless (us) |
| 5 GHz | Medium, line-of-sight preferred | High · unlicensed, busy | Wi-Fi, smaller WISP links |
| 6 GHz | Medium, line-of-sight | Very high · newly opened | Wi-Fi 6E/7, modern WISP gear |
| 24 / 60 / 80 GHz | Short, strict line-of-sight | Massive — fiber-class | Tower-to-tower backhaul, mmWave |
For residential fixed wireless we live mostly in the 3 – 6 GHz range. It's the sweet spot between distance and capacity. Backhaul between our tower sites runs much higher — 60 and 80 GHz point-to-point links carry the aggregate traffic from a tower back to a fiber drop.
Common questions about how this all works.
Do I need a clear line of sight to the tower?
Yes — at the frequencies we use, the dish needs to "see" the tower. We can usually clear light obstructions with mast height, but heavy tree cover or another building in the path will kill the link. Our installer checks line of sight before mounting anything, and if it won't work, we tell you up front and don't charge you.
Does rain or fog slow it down?
At our residential frequencies (3–6 GHz), no — rain attenuation is real but small. The higher backhaul frequencies (60+ GHz) do see weather effects, which is why we engineer those links with margin. From your end, you wouldn't notice a difference between a clear day and a wet one.
Is this 5G?
No. 5G is a cellular standard built for mobile devices. Our service is fixed wireless — a dedicated radio link between your roof and our tower, not the cellular network. See the side-by-side comparison.
Does the dish need power?
Yes, but it shares the Ethernet cable. Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) sends both data and power up the same cable to the dish. The PoE injector lives indoors next to your router. No second power outlet on the roof.
What happens if my neighbor signs up too?
Each access point has a finite capacity, but it's planned around the customers it serves and we add capacity as a sector fills. The reason 5G home internet slows down at peak is that you're sharing capacity with every phone in the neighborhood — our sectors only carry Jelly customers and we control the load.
See if your roof has a path to one of our towers.
Most of San Diego County is in range of an existing site. Drop your address and we'll tell you straight whether we can serve you.
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