Some of the wireless internet service providers (WISPs) that operate here in Ireland operate on the 5GHz Wi-Fi band. This is basically like a home Wi-Fi set up, but on a much bigger scale. The purpose of the dish is provide a high enough gain to pick up and transmit the signal over a several mile radius. The tower usually consists of several sector antennas, typically three aimed 120 degrees apart operating on separate channels. Customers on one sector generally share the same channel like on a home Wi-Fi network.
The last WISP I was with used Ubiquiti hardware. When I changed provider, I was curious myself to check out its web interface and to my surprise they never changed the default password on the dish hardware's web interface. Its configuration was very similar to home Wi-Fi, mainly an SSID, WPA2 passphrase and internal IP address set. Their service end likely had a gateway server that throttled the up/down bandwidth according to whatever package was ordered, while also metering the usage from the assigned IP address.
Ubiquiti has a training book freely available on their website which goes into detail on how enterprise Wi-Fi works including on a large scale that WISPs use:
https://dl.ubnt.com/guides/training/courses/UEWA_Training_Guide_V2.1.pdf
A few other WISPs here use LTE on the licenced 3.6GHz band. This basically works the same as a mobile phone LTE service, but where the operator has exclusive control over its assigned spectrum, LTE hardware and installation. As this is a managed network, it generally performs a lot better than a mobile phone LTE network as each LTE client device (i.e. that dish antenna on the roof) is professionally installed, maximising the signal encoding efficiency. The weaker the signal quality, the more airtime is required to transmit the same amount of data.