fibrewifi service was installed yesterday, I was previously in a dial up only area, so made a huge difference, connection speed I recorded yesterday is 12mb up 12mb down. The download is as fast as the fibreoptic line at my previous address; the 12mb upload is massive, virgin media offered 10mb down 500k upload in comparison. The monthly download limit is 40gb, which is probably more than enough more most, but I will avoid large amounts of hd video to be safe.

In terms of range, I'm around 8miles from the tower at latchingdon.I have been told that a direct line of sight has a positive effect on the signal.

With regard to bandwidth I clocked 15mb download today, Fibrewifi's website says that if bandwidth usage is low then additional bandwidth is directed to the remaining users, which suggests that bandwidth is not an issue on the network. Apparently more towers we be up and running in the near future.

Getting a bit more technical I also tested ping speeds and lost packets ect. on speedtest.net The latency of the line is very low as advertised ~19ms ping (A decent broadband connection should give lower than 100ms) The line should be really good for VOIP or VPN. Lost packets are a real problem @ 86%, which seems ridiculously high (should be close to 0% really), strangely this doesn't seem to noticeably impact the quality of the service, I'm not sure if this is a router or ISP problem. This result makes me question how meaningful the test is more than anything else.

Someone mentioned the possibility of lightning strike in a previous post, I wouldn't expect this to be too much of a problem since the receptor does not need to be at the top of the house, in most areas there will be something else that will get hit first such as power transformers, aerials/trees etc.

[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/894635601.png[/IMG]

Yes I've noticed a packet loss issue: pingtest.net showed zero loss, but I've used Jack Dinns monitoring tool (which gets a mention elsewhere on this site) to sample my connection 3 hourly which shows a consistent 56% loss from bbc.co.uk or google (and I believe their preferred monitoring tool also hints at this). It doesn't seem to noticeably affect anything including video though. The measured download speeds tend to shoot up overnight, and can vary by 2-3Mbps during the day (though I suspect that might be congestion from the TB test file download servers?). Jitter is normally 1-2 with very occaisonal spikes, the pings at 1-3 are I think measuring the backhaul rather than the local connection. It seems to me that torrential rain can halve speeds or cause signal loss which recovers as soon as it eases, though mere heavy rain or anything less, wind, snow or fog has no effect in my experience.

Edited by smurf46 (Wed 28-Jul-10 23:43:08)

Good luck: it seems generally for me the upload speed maxes at 50% of the download speed so I believe you'd be better with the Nano dish which has, I gather, a higher electrical power (22W/16W) so gives a stronger upload signal.

In reply to a post by smurf46:

Good luck: it seems generally for me the upload speed maxes at 50% of the download speed so I believe you'd be better with the Nano dish which has, I gather, a higher electrical power (22W/16W) so gives a stronger upload signal.

Hi,

The legal power limit for Band C in the UK is 4 Watts EIRP, the nano dish has a lower power maximum output power than the nano M5 but does have a higher gain. The power would need to be backed off even then to conform to the +36dBm EiRP (4 watt) limit.

Basically subtract the gain of the antenna from 36 and that's the power level the radio needs to be set at.

The base station isn't allowed any more power either. This is what makes the technical challenges of the WiSP industry so much more "interesting"

The funny thing is, if you are a radio amateur with no technical expertise at all then you can legally transmit far higher powers on that band.. funny old world

I suspect your speed differences are more to do with how speed test sites deal with upload measurements as they often assume the upload is quite slow (as it is with most wireline technologies).

if you are a radio amateur with no technical expertise

aren't they licensed after passing an exam or something ?

hi,

i took that exam back in the early 80's (I was 15 and didn't do any course before taking it), its a multiple choice one and they only need very basic electrical knowledge and have 4 answers to choose from.

i suspect it isn't any harder now and i doubt it covers what hazards you could encounter with 400 Watts input on 5.8 GHz (stick it into a sky size dish and experience an EIRP of ~100kW !)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

if you are a radio amateur with no technical expertise

aren't they licensed after passing an exam or something ?

It will be intresting to see what happens when they have > 100 people connected to the access point.....

And they already have packet loss across the network.

I have been trying to get FIBREWIFI for my business but to no avail, they are not available in the Coggeshall area as of yet. I then looked at County Broadband http://www.countybroadband.co.uk/
Anyone here has any experience with them? Their tariff seem a bit expensive for business use.

no experience with them, but that doesnt seem expensive at all for business use, cheap if anything!