You're right my current disruption might well be down to work around their transmitter in connection with the new service provision but there are no status pages. However that's the exception (this sort of upgrade is one event in six years and was also confidential for contractual reasons) and whilst I'm no expert and my apologies in advance as you probably know this already, I think the general issue is slightly different from fixed line broadband. And don't forget I'm on the resi not business package which has a 99% SLA.
As I understand it wi-fi uses a small unlicensed portion of the wireless band, and very low strength signals by law, so the signal can become blocked e.g. it once happened unexpectedly with some new security fencing around the roof of the the tower block which contains their secondary transmitter (from which I'm served), and I suppose could be whilst people are working around the transmitter (which could be other operators doing overnight maintenance). There are also only 4 broadcast channels.
I think the new service is served from a local water tower on the Dengie, where I suspect there is less competition. My signal crosses hilly north Chelmsford and there are other new operators in the area, so I suspect there is a greater risk of interference, as well as the trees coming into leaf. As I said earlier "usual" downtime is <1 hour per week and any issues tend to be overnight and addressed by 8am. But any signal issues (apart from at the transmitter and I know of only one example bar the recent expansion in their 6 years of operating) are likely to affect only a single connection (because of the "line of sight" issue) rather than generally, so I don't think could be addressed on status pages realistically even though the connection is monitored (DPA apart from anything else). The benefit of wireless is that if you have a good signal on installation, it will stay that way unless there is something like a new building or forest that gets in the way and they don't tend to spring up overnight, and then it'd more likely be a drop in signal strength which doesn't translate directly to a drop in speed. (For me the great advantage was to by-pass the flaky underground cables and regular DSLAM faults which plague the landline).
I also think but stand to be corrected, it's a mesh network so aerials act as repeaters which strengthens the signal (which you receive from more than one direction), unfortunately this doesn't work for me as the first customer in my area. Their tech guy Alex seems to be very highly regarded by local techies so you could probably get much more comfort from a discussion with him.
Edited by smurf46 (Wed 19-May-10 08:33:13)