5 ms·

Sadly I've never had a good experience with "wireless" internet. I've looked into building a WISP a few times but the cost of hardware and no guarantee of actua

by esaym 9y ago

Sadly I've never had a good experience with "wireless" internet. I've looked into building a WISP a few times but the cost of hardware and no guarantee of actual data throughput or quality keeps me away. Most hardware for WISPs have back haul throughput rates advertised at 100-400 mbs, yet most end points at the customer premise will see data rates of 6 - 20mbs. Including the bad jitter, packet loss, and burstyness, and you've got something that is only good for browsing facebook. All the hardware I am aware of still uses the old RTS/CTS methods for media access borrowed from the wifi protocol. Which works fine for 100 end points all within 100ft of each other... But stick 100 end points in a 5 miles radius all trying to get a "clear to send" ack and your in a world of hurt. Yes I know... some tuning will go along way, but at least with the Motorola canopy family, they defaulted to supporting a 15 mile (or was it 20?) radius. And with the WISP's network admin (which is normally always the CEO's young nephew) never changing the defaults because it "just works". This puts a ton of latency on the network since everything is assuming to be waiting on hearing from the node 15 miles away (that may or may not be there). There are some newer systems out now that use TDMA for media access, but from the reviews I see, still getting more than 20mbs to a CPE is unlikely. You best bet would be a gigabit back haul with some p2p access points covering no more than a mile or 2 each, but that means many more antennas and no place to put them. I've seen many WISPs "cover" 100+ square miles with just two access points. It just doesn't work.

goodcanadian 9y ago
This seems like a pessimistic assessment to me. Both my brother and my parents are on rural wireless networks, and they seem to get good service, though I can't say with certainty what technology is used or what bandwidth they get. Skype calls work fine. They don't stream movies due to data caps, however.
- esaym 9y ago
  It is not "pessimistic". It is my actual experience both as an end consumer and a (potential) WISP admin. And please don't mention "works fine" and "has data caps" in the same sentence...
  - goodcanadian 9y ago
    What can I say? My actual experience differs from yours. I have no doubt that there are many fly-by-night operations out there that don't know how to configure their networks properly, but I know of at least two examples that seem to do just fine. There are no significant problems with latency or jitter or lost packets. You seem to take strong issue with data caps. They are unfortunate, but I don't really see any way to avoid that in a wireless environment. Heck, even in a wired environment, I suspect you'll find some limits hidden in the fine print. Even then,the data limit appears to be more of an issue of willingness to pay than any fundamental limitations of the technology: i.e. if customers pay for packages with higher caps, the ISP will have the income to maintain the network to support the higher caps.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
My parents have two ISP options and they're on the east coast (like literally, the town has waterfront on the Atlantic and all the BS that goes with it). They are by no means rural. They have two ISP options. One offers 1mb down. The other is Comcast. 6-20mbps with terrible quality would be a godsend for them and everyone else in the area.
- esaym 9y ago
  You'd rather have "6-20mbps with terrible quality" instead of 100mbs from Comcast? Am I missing something?
  - mjevans 9y ago
    Yes. How horrid Comcast is. They seem unable to perform any kind of maintenance without massively degrading network service over a /large/ area. There are also rumors that technicians will drive to various areas and disconnect (paying) customers in attempts to see if anyone complains about missing service (supposedly as an attempt to boot off freeloaders). Finally, they're Comcast. If there isn't competition in an area to drive service (it sounds like there isn't here) then they probably haven't pushed 100mbit out.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      It'll take you 10 seconds to check instead of speculating. The DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade was basically footprint-wide, so there is a good chance you've got 100 megabits or higher.
    - esaym 9y ago
      I've heard about comcast's support. But I am curious if opening up a business account would be a different experience. At least with Time Warner and AT&T, you just make up a fake business name (unless you have one) and set up a business account. That costs more, but it atleast gets you out of the stupid "1 year" package deals where you have to call support once every year and beg for mercy to lower your bill and get back into another package ....
- 9y ago
tristanb 9y ago
I have a symmetrical 100mbs wireless connection to my home (for $35) from Monkey Brains, a wireless isp.
- esaym 9y ago
  San Fransisco is not a "rural" area. Even on their home page they mention they have access points on over 1000 buildings. Turn off about 998 of those access points and that is what you will be dealing with in the typical rural WISP.
sushisource 9y ago
Realistically just browsing facebook and not having it take forever is going to satisfy these people a lot more than what they have now, which probably takes ages just to load FB. Of course, 4k netflix would be nice too, but I suspect these people just want some basics to start with.
- turk183 9y ago
  I don't see why we need to encourage people to become Facebook zombies. It's pretty vapid entertainment and it represents everything wrong with the Internet today. Now if there was some broader argument for educational purposes then I'm with you. Put another way, if all these people want to do is engage in low culture, there are cheaper ways to accomplish that.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  I think 2 Mbps is minimal for using the web now because every horrible site has an autoloading video on it. The FCC definition of broadband is 25 Mbps.
NelsonMinar 9y ago
I'm typing to you from a rural WISP; 5GHz, 12/1 MBps asymmetric service. My link involves about 3 wireless hops in my ISP before I get to wired infrastructure. It's not terrible and is definitely good enough for streaming video and playing games. I do wish I had wired service though. The biggest problem is the latency. I'm about 40ms from the edge of my ISP before I get to the rest of the Internet (compare 5ms for wired urban Internet.) Also, as you allude to, with a smaller ISP it can often be the CEO's nephew in charge of stuff and professionalism suffers. My older service was 900 MHz 1/0.25 MBps service. That was pretty awful, just too slow to do anything modern with it. The nice thing about 900 MHz is you don't need a clear line of sight.
- alphapapa 9y ago
  MBps or Mbps? I'm guessing the latter, but...
  - NelsonMinar 9y ago
    megabits/second. sorry.
lj3 9y ago
I take it you've never used webpass? By far the fastest ISP I've ever had in my life and it's a WISP. It's a shame google bought them.
dboreham 9y ago
Roughly right, although with enough attention to detail, low subscriber/AP ratios and some luck with spectrum availability it is possible to do better. Source: I built and ran a small WISP for 15 years. IF you are willing to spend the money and invest the time to get it properly deployed and configured, it is possible to achieve decent performance even with 802.11-based gear. For example I'm typing this over a connection with two wireless hops that goes 10 miles to the nearest town that achieves 150/150 with sub-5ms RTT. All the links are point-to-point though. btw rule of thumb is to take whatever advertised throughput a piece of wireless gear has and divide it by four to get a realistic actual performance. 1/2 for the loss between "air" tx-rate and achievable packet payload throughput, then another 1/2 for the difference between full duplex and half-duplex. So that "400Mbps" radio will actually deliver 100, best case.
client4 9y ago
It really depends on how the infrastructure is built. For instance at our WISP we limit tower radius distance to 1 Mile. This allows us to push higher speeds and have lower latency. I do agree; many traditional WISPs try to maximize tower distance to CPE's in an effort to maximize their ROI, however it comes at the cost of a decreased customer experience (though in some areas this is unavoidable). We use Cambium ePMP hardware (the Motorola team split into UBNT and Cambium) in 1 mi radius' and see ~40-90 Mbps down and 10-40 Mbps up.
- chinathrow 9y ago
  What is the reason why up is slower than down?

by esaym 9y ago

goodcanadian 9y ago

This seems like a pessimistic assessment to me. Both my brother and my parents are on rural wireless networks, and they seem to get good service, though I can't say with certainty what technology is used or what bandwidth they get. Skype calls work fine. They don't stream movies due to data caps, however.

esaym 9y ago
It is not "pessimistic". It is my actual experience both as an end consumer and a (potential) WISP admin. And please don't mention "works fine" and "has data caps" in the same sentence...
- goodcanadian 9y ago
  What can I say? My actual experience differs from yours. I have no doubt that there are many fly-by-night operations out there that don't know how to configure their networks properly, but I know of at least two examples that seem to do just fine. There are no significant problems with latency or jitter or lost packets. You seem to take strong issue with data caps. They are unfortunate, but I don't really see any way to avoid that in a wireless environment. Heck, even in a wired environment, I suspect you'll find some limits hidden in the fine print. Even then,the data limit appears to be more of an issue of willingness to pay than any fundamental limitations of the technology: i.e. if customers pay for packages with higher caps, the ISP will have the income to maintain the network to support the higher caps.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

My parents have two ISP options and they're on the east coast (like literally, the town has waterfront on the Atlantic and all the BS that goes with it). They are by no means rural. They have two ISP options. One offers 1mb down. The other is Comcast. 6-20mbps with terrible quality would be a godsend for them and everyone else in the area.

esaym 9y ago
You'd rather have "6-20mbps with terrible quality" instead of 100mbs from Comcast? Am I missing something?
- mjevans 9y ago
  Yes. How horrid Comcast is. They seem unable to perform any kind of maintenance without massively degrading network service over a /large/ area. There are also rumors that technicians will drive to various areas and disconnect (paying) customers in attempts to see if anyone complains about missing service (supposedly as an attempt to boot off freeloaders). Finally, they're Comcast. If there isn't competition in an area to drive service (it sounds like there isn't here) then they probably haven't pushed 100mbit out.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    It'll take you 10 seconds to check instead of speculating. The DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade was basically footprint-wide, so there is a good chance you've got 100 megabits or higher.
  - esaym 9y ago
    I've heard about comcast's support. But I am curious if opening up a business account would be a different experience. At least with Time Warner and AT&T, you just make up a fake business name (unless you have one) and set up a business account. That costs more, but it atleast gets you out of the stupid "1 year" package deals where you have to call support once every year and beg for mercy to lower your bill and get back into another package ....
9y ago

tristanb 9y ago

I have a symmetrical 100mbs wireless connection to my home (for $35) from Monkey Brains, a wireless isp.

esaym 9y ago
San Fransisco is not a "rural" area. Even on their home page they mention they have access points on over 1000 buildings. Turn off about 998 of those access points and that is what you will be dealing with in the typical rural WISP.

sushisource 9y ago

Realistically just browsing facebook and not having it take forever is going to satisfy these people a lot more than what they have now, which probably takes ages just to load FB. Of course, 4k netflix would be nice too, but I suspect these people just want some basics to start with.

turk183 9y ago
I don't see why we need to encourage people to become Facebook zombies. It's pretty vapid entertainment and it represents everything wrong with the Internet today. Now if there was some broader argument for educational purposes then I'm with you. Put another way, if all these people want to do is engage in low culture, there are cheaper ways to accomplish that.
NelsonMinar 9y ago
I think 2 Mbps is minimal for using the web now because every horrible site has an autoloading video on it. The FCC definition of broadband is 25 Mbps.

NelsonMinar 9y ago

I'm typing to you from a rural WISP; 5GHz, 12/1 MBps asymmetric service. My link involves about 3 wireless hops in my ISP before I get to wired infrastructure. It's not terrible and is definitely good enough for streaming video and playing games. I do wish I had wired service though. The biggest problem is the latency. I'm about 40ms from the edge of my ISP before I get to the rest of the Internet (compare 5ms for wired urban Internet.) Also, as you allude to, with a smaller ISP it can often be the CEO's nephew in charge of stuff and professionalism suffers. My older service was 900 MHz 1/0.25 MBps service. That was pretty awful, just too slow to do anything modern with it. The nice thing about 900 MHz is you don't need a clear line of sight.

alphapapa 9y ago
MBps or Mbps? I'm guessing the latter, but...
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  megabits/second. sorry.

lj3 9y ago

I take it you've never used webpass? By far the fastest ISP I've ever had in my life and it's a WISP. It's a shame google bought them.

dboreham 9y ago

Roughly right, although with enough attention to detail, low subscriber/AP ratios and some luck with spectrum availability it is possible to do better. Source: I built and ran a small WISP for 15 years. IF you are willing to spend the money and invest the time to get it properly deployed and configured, it is possible to achieve decent performance even with 802.11-based gear. For example I'm typing this over a connection with two wireless hops that goes 10 miles to the nearest town that achieves 150/150 with sub-5ms RTT. All the links are point-to-point though. btw rule of thumb is to take whatever advertised throughput a piece of wireless gear has and divide it by four to get a realistic actual performance. 1/2 for the loss between "air" tx-rate and achievable packet payload throughput, then another 1/2 for the difference between full duplex and half-duplex. So that "400Mbps" radio will actually deliver 100, best case.

client4 9y ago

It really depends on how the infrastructure is built. For instance at our WISP we limit tower radius distance to 1 Mile. This allows us to push higher speeds and have lower latency. I do agree; many traditional WISPs try to maximize tower distance to CPE's in an effort to maximize their ROI, however it comes at the cost of a decreased customer experience (though in some areas this is unavoidable). We use Cambium ePMP hardware (the Motorola team split into UBNT and Cambium) in 1 mi radius' and see ~40-90 Mbps down and 10-40 Mbps up.

chinathrow 9y ago
What is the reason why up is slower than down?