This morning there was a news item on BBC Essex about a new long-distance wireless broadband service being launched in Essex, starting with Chelmsford, with symmetric speeds of 25mbps or 50mbps.
The company Buzcom is a london based outfit - I've seen the name before. I'm sure google is helpfull but I'm not looking now.
I have 1 customer on the network and am waiting for some real feedback once they have been using it for a few weeks.
Some things we did find out thought;
They use Easynet for therebackhaul to the internet
The 'survey' they did for my customer was a mess - they used a survey tool for a motorola point to point microwave link and not the actual hardware they are using on the live network.
They came to install and didn't bring a long enough pole to mount the CPE unit and had to go away and come back another day once they had the correct one.
They got the thing installed then found out the path they had 'surveyed' was blocked by another house and had to re align the link to another site (without a further survey)
You get an external IP at the CPE but there are lots of bridged connections within the network.
Ping times look ok at the moment, BBC is only 7 *shown* hops to the BBC most via easynet
Throughput looks ok at the moment but we have no way of finding out how many people are on the system.
The internet connection was reported to max out at about 10mbit both ways - but they have done at least 1 upgrade since that test and I'm waiting for more results.
They had an entire weekend of down time - we have no idea why at the moment.
There coverage projection maps are just that - projections as far as we can tell.
They provide support for the radio link, but we are not sure about the rest.
There radius is not working correctley at the moment, there are no usage figures logged or viewable by the end user.
No obvious lightning protection was installed at the CP End
We have not had any 'bad weather' tests yet - due to the err lack of bad weather!
They apear to also be offrering a normal WiFi network with AP's at local places - we have no details of that part of the network as yet.
We don't know how many sites they have, or if there sites are sectored or not.
We don't know what resilliance there is within the network yet.
It's been hard to get any details out of them - the website is shocking.
We have found no SLA's or anything involving a path that becomes later blocked by something (A building or something)
Also beware planning restrictions and things in the link path of which both may stop you getting this installed.
A friend of mine runs a local IT firm out Essex way he was looking at them as something he can offer his customers but at the moment is not impressed with the little info he's been able to get, or the install of my user out there.
We await more details. It's a nice idea and could work very well, but given the start I won't be putting anyone else on there for a while.
This thread is a bit long and I've not managed to read through it all - sorry. If this post attracts enough attention I may ask a mod to move it, or split it off somewhere to make it a bit easier for everyone.
Edited by IamQ (Mon 12-Jul-10 23:44:40)