Has anyone had any experience with wireless internet? I'm not talking about networking. I'm about 7 miles from town and someone is advetising line of sight wireless internet. The receiver/antenna is a box about 8X10X3" with a cable to your ethernet connection.

The fellow says I should expect 10 to 50 times faster downloading than my dial-up connection. Are these numbers realistic? Are these systems very affected by atmospheric conditions? ( like satellite TV receivers in the rain )

p.s. This is my only option for 2 way faster speeds.

 

we have speednet at work and it works off and antena like what you are talking about, it works great i think we get 2 meg/sec sevice

 

10 to 50 times faster speed seems very realistic. Rain doesn't affect it much, (I'd imagine the signal is either 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz.) Rain can affect microwave at 10GHz. In any case you'll get much greater speed than you get now - depending on the bandwidth the WISP has alloted, you might get faster than dsl, both upload and download. You might have to knock the snow off it, but I've seen 5.8 go 9 miles, (an exception). Ask the wireless guy to come out to your place and demo. Most do it for free and you can see for yourself.. Usually you have to buy your end of the equipment, ($150 - $300), and/or pay for install, ($50 - $150), but it can be negotiated.

While I'm on the subject... The FCC has changed the frequency plan for the 2.5 - 2.7GHz band. Before, it was grouped at 6MHz spacing with a lot of the band going to educational TV, (like for colleges). They still have a good chunk, however; a few years ago Nextel and Sprint bought up about 2/3 of the freq. in the country in that band. They have to use MMDS which is 802.16e technology, (you might be used to 802.11b&g). The difference with this is you won't need line of site, for the first 3 miles or so and the antenna is a box like a cable modem that can sit by your computer if you want, with speeds possibly faster than cable, (nothing beats cable when your the only one on the line.) The grouping will now be 16Mhz per channel.

The real power is it sets the groundwork for cellular internet. This means surfing while you're in the car, checking movie times, dinner reservations, take the laptop to the park, whatever. It also means the same coverage problems we now have with cell phones. Some parts of the country already have it set up as WISP's, but nothing big, corporate and nationwide - yet.

 

I used to work for a WISP. Depending on the equipment chosen by the WISP it can be about the speed of ISDN like we experienced when we used the Nokia equipment, to about T-1 speed when we deployed the Motorola Canopy (5.8) radioes.

 

Thanx for the info. I think I'll give it a whirl.

 

just a slight side track, anyone hear of 802.16, it is suppose to be broadband internet on a larger scale than what is mention above?

 

802.16 - capable of 75Mbps both up and down, (but depending on how it's configured). Range out to 30 miles, but non-line of site out to about 3. Each channel hopefully will be 20 Meg and the wisp can assign a customer a freq. range. It's kind of a "smart" technology where if the base see's your signal dropping out, it can slow down to even things out, (QPSK). I worked a job about 5 years ago where the big guys were gearing up for it, but things kind of slowed with the stock market thing. It's starting to heat up again with some FCC changes. Someones doing it out in the midwest someplace, but don't look for it on a big scale till 06 or 07. Search "WiMAX." The technology is out there, it just cost big $$$. Not really for the users though, kind of like cell phones.

 

i would agree with Howdy about having them come out and demo the product. i currently work for a WISP. the first thing we do, for nearly every customer, is go by their location and set-up some equipment to make for certain that the signal quality will be sufficient for them to recieve good quality service, but every company is going to do things different.

 

How successful would a wireless network operate with this set-up? Is there a minimum speed to make it work effectively or does the speed matter?

 

if you are refering to getting access to your house, there are to many unknown variables with the WISP that you are trying to get the service from. for instance, the type of equipment the WISP is using to cloud the area, which will then coincide with the type of CPE (customer premise equipment) they will be able to use. IF they have equipment that will cover your area, then you get into the "line of sight" issue. can you see their cell site from your house? remember they have to mount the equipment somewhere, and if you are like me i don't want to have screws drilled through the shingles in my roof.

like i said, man. the best thing is to have them come out to your house and do a link test and see what the link quality is. we do this for pretty much every potential customer. if the link quality is not up to par, we tell them we're sorry and keep them on a list if we expand closer to that area. this is better for both the company and the customer, because it cuts down on problems with customers that might be just out of reach or have to many things in the way.