Rise Broadband is a specialist internet service provider. It operates in a niche category of internet service, which is fixed wireless.
The Rise Broadband network is particularly dense in Iowa, Illinois, and Texas. It has no coverage on either the East or West Coast.
Although you may have experienced Wi-Fi in a home or in a coffee shop, “fixed wireless” is not the same thing. Nor is it the same as the internet that you can get on your phone. Those Wi-Fi systems only cover a small area. Usually, only within a part of a property.
Typical Wi-Fi routers can’t send signals very far and they are not good at delivering the internet to homes. Usually, Wi-Fi systems that cover the inside a home connect to a cable-delivered internet service, which leads out from the home to the internet.
Mobile internet is very similar to fixed wireless internet services in some respects. In both cases, the internet signal is broadcast from a transmitter on a tower. While mobile internet systems carry the signal from tower to tower across the country, fixed wireless systems usually combined some form of wired delivery system from the ISP’s offices up to a local neighborhood transmitter. It is only wireless for the last stretch of the delivery path. The rest of the journey might be carried on telephone lines, on coaxial cable, or on a fiber optic backbone.
The transmitters that create connections through to individual homes do not operate in the same way as the transmitters used for mobile data. Whereas a mobile cell tower sends out a signal that covers an area that is like an invisible ball, the fixed wireless transmitter directs its signal footprint over a concentrated area. This is called a “point-to-multipoint network and the tower can communicate with several homes at the same time without mixing the signals. This trick is performed by using a slightly different radio frequency for each customer.