I think it's important to understand how USI Wireless's system works, and it
limitations:
It is essentially just a big WiFi network, using the same 802.11 a/b/g protocol
that older home wireless access points use, with the big wrinkle that the
access points are *outside* the houses. So you can connect to it directly, but
signal strength will be comparable to what you would get with a conventional
in-home access point if you tried to access it from outside the house or across
the street (ie. sometimes OK, sometimes terrible). The way they work around
this is to have you install a device (they call it a "USI wireless modem",
generically this would be called a wireless bridge) that picks up the stronger
outdoor signal and via a wire, allows access to the USI network from an indoor
device that you provide, which would usually be a home wireless router. In
other words, the "USI wireless modem" works just like a DSL or cable modem,
only using the USI WiFi network as the link to the Internet, rather than the
phone line (DSL) or coax cable (Cable).
Their current speed offerings top out at 6Mbps down, which is fairly slow by
modern standards, but which is OK for basic web browsing. I'm not sure of the
upload speed but I believe it's quite a bit less than the download speed.
The older a/b/g WiFi protocol they use, however, is a major limitation, since
even if they wanted to offer faster speeds in the future, the protocol itself
has a theoretical limit of 54Mbps and a real-world limit of maybe 20Mbps in
perfect conditions (ie. the outdoor access point is close to your house, the
weather is clear, the stars are aligned, etc) To compare, Comcast currently
offers 50 and 100Mbps cable connections in Minneapolis, and Google is rolling
out 1000Mbps fiber connections in other cities. USI's infrastructure is just
too old to compete in delivering 'fast' internet.
That said, when these negatives are understood, it's still a remarkable
achievement for an entire city to be blanketed by a single WiFi network, and
USI's pricing is reasonable and you can sign up for just a month of service to
try it without the modem. When we first moved into our house in Standish, I
used their service for a month (no "modem", just direct between my laptop and
their access point, which I could see out the window on the lamp post at the
corner), and it met expectations. Not fast, but about equivalent to a basic DSL
connection. We did soon switch to Comcast cable to get much faster speeds,
native IPv6 etc.
However, if you have very basic internet needs, and want something cheap, it's
a decent option.