Milwaukee PC
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Have you looked at satellite internet?
Last time I looked at satellite internet, the ping time made me want never to look at it again.
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Satellite internet is good for people out in the sticks who need reasonable upload/download speeds that the land line providers cannot give. Satellite internet is not good for any of the following:
- Streaming video outside the hours of midnight to 6am (hello, massive overages and/or getting throttled 2 days into the month)
- Online gaming
- VOIP (unless you like "can you hear me now over")
- Low cost internet
You might check with http://www.wispa.org/ to see if there's a fixed wireless ISP in your area. If they're network ops are halfway competent (and you don't live in a thicket), a WISP can get you quality reasonably close to land-line for probably less than the cost of satellite. (Full disclosure, I'm a halfway competent network op for a WISPA member in the Ohio area, and we routinely eat Time Warner Cable & Frontier/CenturyLink DSL's lunch.)
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I think ee in my area maxes out at 72 Mb/s
I assume that EE just resell the Openreach VDSL product, in which case I think the max is about 80Mb.
VM HFC goes up to 152Mb but I don't need that.
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Sigh, if we're now in an Internet connection pissing match I guess I'll whip mine out too.
I think everybody's just being an asshole and taunting Ben L.
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I think everybody's just being an asshole and taunting Ben L.
It's funny that those are two separate things.
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The limit is 72mb according to their "what can you get page?" in my area. TBH I was happy ordering 18 Mb/s but that meant they would have gave me an ASDL router not a fibre one and the speeds are very variable.
In Spain 4Mb/s was "good" and anything over that is an improvement.
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The limit is 72mb according to their "what can you get page?" in my area.
Apparently I lost the ability to read that bit. Max for the product is 80Mb but it's dependant on distance from the cabinet.
It's 69Mb max here from EE.
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I did edit the hell out of it quite quickly.
Yeah, I made the mistake when reading the 18 Mb/s, because 4-10Mbit/s was fine for me in Spain so I wasn't bothered too much having the speed I have now. But to have a consistent speed and something guaranteed I needed to pay more for fibre (only a few more quid).
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Hmmm, the "ISP" on SpeedTest is my company's name. I didn't know that we're an ISP. We're in healthcare...
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a WISP can get you quality reasonably close to land-line for probably less than the cost of satellite
NBNCo is apparently going to put a wireless tower in my town soon. I'll see what their prices are like once it's in. If they can give me all-you-can-eat connectivity for less than the $60/month I'm currently paying for my quite decent ADSL, I'll consider switching; I suspect their backhaul will be better than Telstra's.
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You don't have to be an ISP to own IPs, which I'm 99.9% sure is how those speed test programs determine that.
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More than likely. The company is big enough to get its own
(123) 555-wxyzphone block.
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In general we don't really compete strongly with TWC/CL/Frontier in price (especially performance/price). We're not doing usage based billing yet, but probably will be soon, and I know a lot of other WISPs are moving that way; peak backhaul is at least as much of a problem (and probably more) for WISPs vs telco-style carriers.
The big thing we win on (and I suspect this is where most WISPs make their hay) is customer service and nimbleness. We need a new POP to relieve saturation or expand the footprint? $5k gets it up and going and another $10k later makes it a big backhaul site if it seeds out. Customer has a problem? He's only one of a few hundred/thousand, not just a number in a completely different (part of the) country from technical support.
So if you're looking for just flat out best peak/marketing performance, I doubt NBN is gonna win hard there. But I'd be willing to wager they're going to be substantially better in the customer service department. And if they're a good WISP, they're probably more focused on keeping performance consistent, rather than just selling you a big top line number that they know they can never hit.
(That said, there are a couple shitty WISPs in my area who sell 802.11g service with a 1x1 802.11a backhaul at 10M/10M 15M/15M 20M/20M packages and then load up 20+ customers on a single AP. If you see a WISP whose packages aren't very asymmetric, keep it at a safe arm's length -- either their engineers fundamentally don't understand wifi, their engineers don't have any pull with management, or they're using shitty and very expensive Motorola gear and are going to be getting it back out of your hide somehow.)
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true
Not talking to Arantor on skype seems to help this test though.
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true
Not talking to Arantor on skype seems to help this test though.
That's mildly disturbing how much bandwidth Skype consumes.
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yes! So you have like none left with your shitty connection XD
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Behold, my corporate office link:
And from the datacenter:
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What do you think of Ubiquiti's gear, just for interest's sake?
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That's mildly disturbing how much bandwidth Skype consumes.
Thing about Skype is that it's using your PC as part of a distributed directory lookup system. Even when you're not making or receiving a call, Skype just sits there chewing up your bandwidth with other people's directory traffic.
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yes! So you have like none left with your shitty connection XD
Not my problem all the type Skype works...
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In general, we've found MikroTik gear to be superior to Ubiquiti in almost every way, and the price point is substantially similar.
We've had very poor results with the UBNT 3.65GHz gear, and we stopped using their 2.4GHz clients about a year ago. Their APs are especially bad compared to MT gear (even in an all-UBNT setup... MT AP with mixed CPEs works better than all-UBNT, and all MT works miles better, as the RTS/CTS mechanisms in their proprietary nv2 protocol do wonders for minimizing hidden node and other fun fixed wireless problems).
In general, my experience is that pretty much all WISPs will start UBNT, b/c it's cheapest. The smart ones figure out the extra 10-20% for MT (or some other gear) is worth the cost.
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Of course, the other big weakness with fixed wireless is that it's more or less impossible to get good consistent coverage within an urban area unless you can put micro-POPs on every single structure over 60 feet tall. So, as much as I'll gladly proselytize for fixed wireless all day long, I have Time Warner Cable at home because I live in town and all of our POPs are blocked by houses & their trees & the factories/water towers in town.
But at least I live on one of their good loops, so that I don't have to work with their tech support often.
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I knew a guy on IRC who owned/sole-engineered a WISP in rural Texas. He had his lawnmower done up with a laptop mount. "Hey Jake, what are you up to?" "Smokin' a blunt and toolin' around on my lawnmower looking for dead spots"
or "Smokin' a blunt climbin' towers"
or "Smokin' a blunt and having an erection" (that'd be raising a new tower)
or "Smokin' a blunt and then headed over to replace some awful CPE"
Was an interesting dude.
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Interesting. I've only ever used their 5GHz stuff (couple of house-to-house links, one with NanoStation M5s and the other with AirGrids) and they seem to work fine for that.
Will keep MicroTik in mind if I ever need to build anything more demanding.
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Holy crap, this looks like good value. Is it?
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Subject to the two limitations of the hardware, it's a pretty good deal, yes.
- The Access Point unit is a 90 degree beamwidth sector. So if you have one site to the east of your head end and one site to the west, you can't connect them both to the same physical access point using the SXT AP.
- The five clients in that pack come with License Level 3. At that license, the unit can function as a CPE (connect to an access point), or can function in what MT calls "bridge" mode, which is basically an AP that can accept only one connection. To accept multiple connections ("ap bridge" mode) requires License Level 4, which is a bunch of money to add to the unit (typically around $40).
Basically, their pricing model is such that you need to make sure your APs are the higher power hardware that comes with Level 4 pre-installed; buying a Level 3 hardware unit and re-licensing it will be substantially more expensive. Of course, this has a hidden support advantage for them -- you don't get people putting up CPEs with a 14 degree beamwidth antenna and then wondering why the coverage from it is terrible.
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To be completely honest, I think a good portion of the "stigma" or underperformance of the UBNT gear comes from the fact that you can literally be brain dead and still set it up in a running fashion. Whereas most other gear doesn't quite hold your hand as much, so it's difficult to set up at all unless you have a basic understanding of wireless & networking theory.
But, assuming a non-brain dead operator, I would expect UBNT gear to perform equally to MT in a radio line of sight, short range (<5mi/8km for 5GHz, <4mi/6.5km for 2.4GHz) setup with a properly limited number of clients and no interference in the area -- either self-interference from many sectors on the same POP or interference from competing devices.
Once you start getting into interference or partially obstructed line of sight, I just haven't seen the UBNT equipment cope nearly as well as MT does. And, to my knowledge, the UBNT equipment doesn't really have any TDMA-based protocol to allow you to work around the hidden node problems inherent in many-client access points & high-gain outdoor antennas. So all-MT solutions seriously outperform, especially for jitter sensitive applications, once you put them in NV2 mode and use the TDMA extensions. Of course, once you do that, you're vendor locked, since you're not operating in WiFi standard mode any more.
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@The FCC said:
See? Even ben_lubar has broadband*!
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I'd be interested in knowing what it is. When I got a new computer, I went looking for the stuff I had on the old one, and didn't find anything.
Sorry, it took me a while to look it up. I have been using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/download-helper-for-chrom/doaaaibbokbcnildjihnopkomjkofihd?hl=en-US, but as stated uptopic, I didn't like it as much as its FF counterpart. I don't remember what exactly annoyed me though.
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6M DSL
BLAZING SPEED
5MB of Web SpaceAlso the entire page is an image, so fuck them.
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From TWC? How much does your work pay for that? One human sacrifice a day?
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dunno. want me to ask our network guy? i know we have a direct fiber line, and he does look like he has a side business running an abattoir.
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Doesn't really matter because I can't get it down here :V
Can't wait for Google to announce fiber coming here in December. Please dear god bring that here.
Apparently Frontier, who is rolling out fiber in Durham, wants $219/month for 1Gbps
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Thanks. Bookmarked for reference when I have time to do something about it.
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Airmax = NV2. They're both proprietary TDMA protocols for the respective vendors. If you've been benchmarking NV2 vs ubnt straight 802.11 implementation I'm not surprised you see better mtik performance. Of course, then you can't mix CPEs.
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I will stipulate that I have no serious experience with Airmax in the standard client access bands. We are using Airmax on a couple 24GHz links for backhaul and the links are basically useless, but I think those are frequency interference specific problems, not the protocol or the quality of UBNT gear.
That said, we have used quite a mix & match of:
- UBNT AP with mixed UBNT & MT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- UBNT AP with pure UBNT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with mixed UBNT, MT, and StarOS CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with pure MT CPEs, 802.11 mode
- MT AP with pure MT CPEs, nv2 mode
And the relative qualities have been basically as in that order above, with what seems to us a quite large gap between the two UBNT AP options and the MT AP options.
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I'd had good luck with the airfibers, of course with the caveat that they're ultra finicky about alignment (I think we needed 6-8 back and forth alignments to get within a dB or two of expected) and only work out to 3-4 mi with any reliability, both due to the band in use. Gad good luck with homogeneous UBNT and AirMax, though the UNII bands were starting to get full of crap. No longer in the business, though, so my info is a year or two out of date.
Granted, we were using the ubnt APs with the aftermarket shields, both on PtP and PtMP links, which supposedly helps considerably in blocking out the interference on them.
AOL Broadband - Wikipedia
