WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct?
Also, how would you go about making an ISP for a dense urban area with no real higher-than-everything-else structures? Like, say you wanted to build out fiber in Berkeley: there is dark fiber going down the middle of the city, you'd need to get a physical wire from the cable to some room where you split it out in to other cable bunches? Is most of the difficulty in doing so from the difficulty in physically putting down wires?
> WISPs have higher latency/loss than wired, correct?
Not necessarily, depends on what equipment is used and what the topology of the network is. It's not impossible to get 40-50ms latency on WISP networks out to Google, which is similar to what I get on Comcast.
To your second point - my specialty is wireless, but the reality is that wireless doesn't work everywhere. If there really is no single location that can see at least a few hundred homes with full line of sight then wireless probably isn't the answer. So then you're looking at fiber, and I think you're exactly right - the difficulty is in getting that wire down the last mile from the center of town (or whatever) to the customer. Sorry I don't know Berkley very well.
Can't speak to a whole system perspective however radio tends to propagate faster than fiber. There was a story a while back about some HFT firm wanting to install a giant tower in a small town outside London to get lower latency into the exchanges.
Also, how would you go about making an ISP for a dense urban area with no real higher-than-everything-else structures? Like, say you wanted to build out fiber in Berkeley: there is dark fiber going down the middle of the city, you'd need to get a physical wire from the cable to some room where you split it out in to other cable bunches? Is most of the difficulty in doing so from the difficulty in physically putting down wires?