Wireless WAN any good?

[Necrolezbeast]

I am not sure the company name, nor am I sure you guys can even help me with this but here it goes anyway.... A new company is making it's way into the Salt Lake valley with their wireless WAN connection over an amplified 802.11a signal, they will have over 170 nodes within a 20mi/20mi radius. They offer 1.5mb/1.5mb for $69.95 and 144k/144k for $19.95, and everything inbetween...I was just wondering how this works and if it will be any good? My friend has Sprint Broadband and it sucks for anything but downloading and I was wondering if this would be the same way? Also one of their workers I know was explaining to me that I could be on my laptop driving down the road and be on the net the whole time and the cat5 was also the power source of the antenna...this all sounds amazing to me and I have no idea how any of it works so if someone could help explain any of this and tell me if this should have a good ping for gaming...thanks

 

[Soybomb]

There's plenty of resources available from google if you want in depth information,, but sure wireless broadband can be great if the isp is good, just like any other type of the internet access. Wireless will not effect your ping times. Usually its it fixed broadband though and you can't roam with it, so you might double check that.

 

[Necrolezbeast]

I have always thought and heard it would create high pings and that it would be a set point. But the person I know is a node and is an installer for their service and he assured me it was transportable... I know I can find things on google, but I would understand better if someone explained to me, and it would be more summed up rather than a whole article with most everything being pointless

 

[Soybomb]

I have always thought and heard it would create high pings and that it would be a set point.

And as I said, that is incorrect. The increase would not be noticable, as in small single digit milliseconds. The only system I know of that really could provide a noticable increase is motorola's canopy that usually is 20 ms latecy no matter what, or at least thats the way it was when I checked it out, rumor had it that might change with firmware later.

I could write a 30 page paper on on "how wireless works" and still not scratch the surface, do you have other specific questions? Ask the ISP as well, they should be able to tell you real life numbers on what you can expect to see from their hardware.

 

[ktwebb]

The poor ping times you have heard about was probably in a conversation about satellite broadband. That does in fact offer terrible latency but terrestrial wireless, in your case 5.3 Ghz fixed microwave, shouldn't add more than a ms or two to your pings, assuming your association to the parent AP is a good one. Your bud telling you about driving around town is REALLY stretching the capabilities of a omni on a tower. As long as you have good line of sight to the tower then yeah, you might be able to get reception to a laptop or something and would definitely get an association if you had a directional antenna, assuming the distance wasn't extreme. 1.5 up and down for 70 bucks is pretty good and since they use 5 Ghz equipment you shouldn't have to worry about too much interference. Not for awhile anyway. They have the right idea. Higher bands above the crowded fray of the 2.4 crowd. I suspect they use bridges and not AP's but I suppose they could use AP's and workgroup bridges. See if you can find out what kind of equipment they use. The name brand and I'd be able to tell you more.

 

[Necrolezbeast]

Alright it sounds good then, but I will ask my friend to run a traceroute and bandwidth test to make sure it is hitting near what it should. But it won't be available for about another 30 days or so, so I will report back with some results. Thanks for the help guys

 

[Bleep]

We have had a wireless service here for a couple of years and it works well for those out in the countryside that do not have cable or a decent telephone line, you have to be line of site to the repeater though so I dont think it would work in a large city without a bunch of repeaters. Here is is very expensive $69.00 for 128/128

Bleep