Broadband wireless question?

[cardiac]

I am looking at getting broadband wireless (It's the only game out in the country), and was wondering what kind of rates to expect. I'll only be the second person on this tower/site. I am less than 1.5 miles line of site from the tower. The company says 1.5 meg is not out of the question....How true?

Thanks,

Bob

 

[Lord Evermore]

Depends on what type of wireless they're actually using, and what equipment. Weather is also a factor, and whether there's any sort of obstruction at all. I don't think you're far enough out to consider distance as a possible limitation. I imagine that with directional antennas and 802.11b, 1.5Mbps certainly isn't out of the question.

 

[cmetz]

It REALLY depends.

For example, what kind of uplink does the WISP have? If you're going into a base station and out a T1, then there's 1.544Mb/s shared across everyone, which isn't so great. What technology do they use, how far away are you, how many subscribers and how heavy users are they, do they/how do they traffic shape, etc.

A lot of it comes down to whether the WISP is competent or not, and that's often a real crap-shoot. A good WISP is quite viable and a reasonable choice, a bad WISP is going to be terrible.

And yet, even a bad WISP is likely to be a much happier place than being on a modem.

 

[cardiac]

Thanks guys. What it comes down to is this: I have been on a dial-up connection for 10 years. I think I'll be happy, at least for a while.

I don't know what equipment they use, cmetz. I do know that they ran new cabling in to the site (fiber optics?) last fall. I will only be the second user on this site, and the first one is a business where the tower is located, and I don't think they get on the net hardly at all.........

Lord Evermore, there are no obstructions in the way, and it is a directional antenna that they use. It looks kinda like a convex mesh satellite dish, or one of the satellite antennas we use in amateur radio on 900mhz.

Thanks guys, I do feel better about it.

Bob

 

[Lord Evermore]

You should be good to go. A friend of mine is in the process of starting up a wireless ISP (and phone and TV service) with the same sort of setup. You should be able to talk to the provider and find out what real-world bandwidth is likely, rather than just the "up to blah" that they use for marketing.

 

[danzig]

We use fixed wireless currently at our shop . Our ISP is using Breezecom frequency hopping equipment and Breezecome cpe . We are lucky at our location , it is only 1.4 miles with a clear line of site to the tower . Our speeds are advertised at 256/256 and usually about 20% higher than that , and rarely lower . We were on dial up for years as well , ISDN was too $expensive$ for what it offered . I personally got the wireless service at my house 2 days ago after suffering with 26k dial up and DirecPC for years . Our ISP charges $49.95 monthly with a $200 deposit on equipment , latency varies (load on the access points ?) with ping times generally to sites like google between 60ms and 140 ms .

 

[Soybomb]

Sure those are very possible numbers assuming their backbone can handle it. Talk to some of their other customers and see what speeds they get.

 

[cardiac]

Thanks for that info, Danzig. And Soybomb, there's no one to talk to, as I am going to basically be the first one on this tower
I am 1.3 miles from the tower, with no obstructions. I'm getting excited..... (As excited as a 43 y/o guy can)

Bob

 

[titanmiller]

You sure are a lucky man, my dial-up maxes out at around 14kbps and living several miles from town DSL and Cable will never be an option so I hope wireless becomes available. I bet I'll die by the time I'm 20 from all of the stress in my life due to the lack of broadband...seriously its that bad.

 

[pmailloux]

Well since I work for a Wisp I can tell ya, the speeds can vary greatly depending on what kinda equipment they use, we use alvarion equipment and we can offer very large pipes with it, we are actually in the talks with some apartment owners to possibly bring in 8 Mbps to feed there entire apartment community. They currently use T1's from telco and obviously are very expensive and isnt enough for there needs. Anyway the point is if your wisp only has a T1 backbone then your speeds will be much less as you will be sharing 1.544 Mbps with everyone else also using it. I have also heard of some Wisps using Dsl for there backbone, which obviously isnt the best for performance when your sharing it. I also know of a Wisp offering up to 10 Mbps to there customers. So your results may vary greatly. Hope this helps.

 

[danzig]

Our Wisp is using Alvarion equipment . They have 4 antennae on the tower for different parts of the county to see . I think they have 3.2 mb capacity for each antenna ? They are using Sprint bandwidth carried to the mountain where the tower is located via 2 Verizon (they suck ! ) T1's . I am friends with the guys that operate the ISP and they are supposed to be close to getting a significant bandwidth increase for the same $ from Sprint ( and get as far away from crappy Verizon as they can ! Verizon really sucks here ! ) and dropping as much of Verizon as they can . We are supposed to get a speed bump to 512kb service then

 

[cardiac]

Just my luck; they are scheduled to install everything tomorrow afternoon, and now we have thunderstorms forecast. Bet they won't go up on my roof if there are thunderboomers around. Hell, I will......:frown:

Bob

 

[amdskip]

Depends where they want the antena, side or roof of the house. After they get that figured out and aimed right it's a pretty straight foward process. You will have a static IP I belive too so thats cool.

 

[ktwebb]

Just my luck; they are scheduled to install everything tomorrow afternoon, and now we have thunderstorms forecast. Bet they won't go up on my roof if there are thunderboomers around. Hell, I will......

They are putting up a lightening rod. They'll be grounding it (assumably. if they do not then you might want to look elsewhere for your needs), but while they are up there they are vulnerable, and are touching a metal mast much of the time. Trust me, if you did it for a living, you wouldn't install an above roof mast with a thunder/lightening storm going on either. Not if you are reasonably intelligent anyway.

 

[cardiac]

ktwebb, I understand, believe me. I don't have a choice when to work in lightening storms or not: I'm a paramedic/firefighter by trade (22 years now).

Well, the weather held out and I got it installed. Got a static IP, too. All I can say is WOW. I went to a few of those speed test sites, and all of them were between 1.1 and 1.4mbps (I think I labeled that right). I gotta go play.......This makes the 'net fun again.....

Thanks for the info guys,

Bob

 

[amdskip]

Sweet speeds there! Whats your upload speed?

 

[cardiac]

I haven't uploaded anything very big, but it appears to be around 30-40kb/sec, as it was still increasing when it finished.
I found out they use Alverion and Orinco equipment.

This is fun..........

Bob

 

[amdskip]

Run the speed test at www.dslreports.com and it will give you your actualy download/upload speeds.

 

[cardiac]

Well, for whatever reason now, Java won't work. So, I can't access DSL reports speed test until I figure it out. I just loaded SP-1 for XP Pro, and some other updates, and I bet that is what is causing it.......Gotta figure this out.

Bob

 

[amdskip]

Originally posted by: cardiac
Well, for whatever reason now, Java won't work. So, I can't access DSL reports speed test until I figure it out. I just loaded SP-1 for XP Pro, and some other updates, and I bet that is what is causing it.......Gotta figure this out.

Bob

Yup, thats exactly correct.

 

[cardiac]

Ghosted back to my pre-SP1 state and Javascripts still won't run on DSLREPORTS.COM. Oh, well, at least my wireless is running OK
I do need to figure this out though......

Bob

 

[cardiac]

Still can't get DSLREPORTS to run. Bandwidth.com reports 1,492.03 kbps, so it seems to be pretty decent. I got about the same results over at CNET's test site......

Bob

 

[danzig]

cardiac , go to Sun's site and download their java virtual machine , or download the Opera browser with java . I wish our wisp would get their contract with Sprint ironed out so I could get speeds closer to what you get

 

[cardiac]

Thanks for the tip, I'm heading to Sun's site right now....

Bob

 

[cardiac]

Here's something maybe a little more realistic: I just downloaded the new ROM version for my Dell Axim PDA, which was a 27.2mb zip file, and it did it in 1 minute 42 seconds, and the d/l said it was @ 282kb/sec. This was late in the evening, and I had nothing else running. I'm happy, I know that! Hell, it would have been over an hour on my dialup.....

Bob