I'd like to know when they'll most likely start offering the service as well no point announcing it in late August if it isn't coming before the end of the year to be honest.

Anyone in the know should post in here for sure.

Yes I hadn't read what was being promised; if using Airmax flavour of this make, the CPE (station) end will do anything up to aggregate 150Mbps on a near perfect link*.

So "up to 60Mpbs" is certainly possible as the maximum above is equivalent to variable e.g. 75/75 90/60 (*) when no-one else is transmitting / receiving significant amounts of data on other stations sharing the same access point as you.

"Repeaters" can be a little confusing as a term - if we are talking about relay sites without their own fibre backhaul.

The peak speeds above can be achieved if a relay site has a backhaul radio (sometimes a higher licensed band or optical link), separate from the radio(s) of access points that further subscribers connect to. Otherwise if the relay site is a single device, capacity is halved (or worse) as usual by WDS repeating or similar.

Anyway - for capacity would be nice to see more affordable MIMO 3x3 or even 4x4 stuff (in n) on the market.

As for the future I think 802.11ac will be being actively researched, depending on if Atheros have any equivalent chipset suitable for production or if there would have to be a switch to something else like Broadcom.

The risk with the ac stuff will be in space in the 5Ghz band, whereas with current 20 and 40MHz widths you can still find usable channels outdoors in the UK, if links start relying on 80 or 160MHz widths that will be eaten up much quicker whereas if designs which add capacity via the extra spatial streams available it would not be so bad.

(If the market goes as with 2.4Ghz, many consumer devices still go with cheaper single antenna designs they can label it 'n' and quote the maximum data rate for 40Mhz, but that spans too many channels for multiple neighbouring network to perform well).

Hi Guys,

OK to clarify the stages we are going through at the moment, we have been upgrading the fibre backhauls to multiple balanced gigabit circuits from diverse fibre providers and adding capacity to core sites before introducing the packages, for the most part this is now complete. For users like slimj in Thanet, we have half installed the new licensed link which operates at 22ghz for those that are interested and it will carry significant additional bandwidth, the new link is manufactured by Ceragon for those who wish to look it up. It is connected directly to a gigabit fibre and this will be for the new packages independent of the existing backhaul. We are installing new sectors which customers on the new packages will connect to, the end user will keep their existing antenna.

We are hoping to have the new packages released early next month in most areas. We have been working extremely hard on this behind the scenes so please bear with us as it is no small task, we actually started this process around 18 months ago !

Regards
Darren

Looking forward to seeing the usage levels on the new products.

I was told this week that I shouldn't place an order as my expected usage of 100 to 125GB was too high. Was hoping to bond to my existing adsl line to get the benefit of increased upload speed.

I think it will be an improvement moving to usage based tariffs as it will provide a level of clarity that you don't currently have with your unlimited with FUP package.

In addition the FUP of 200GB you currently have on Vmax doesn't seem to be reflected in the advice being given by your sales team.

Having said that if your new packages run to my usage level no doubt I'll be back to place an order

Yes, deciding on the usage allowances is holding things up also, we have been monitoring customer usage to get a feel for what people require, the range is quite vast, some customers this month so far have used around 10gig whereas others have already passed 200gig ! Customers will not have to move to usage based but it will allow us to be more flexible with the package pricing.

Regards
Darren

Out of interest Darren do you expect the speed v distance to be the same on the new products?
I'm around 12Km from the mast so was told to expect around 15Mbps on your Vmax product.
Gary

hi,

As Airmax veterans, i.e. we even had pre-release product here under test back in 2009, I can vouch that 60 Mbps TCP is readily acheivable. In fact under the right conditions over 85 Mbps TCP one way is workable too.

What is interesting, for those who stream UDP stuff, is UDP will do the full 100 Mbps .

We have usage based tariffs , although off peak is unmetered so we often have customers with usage stats like this :-

P 1426.4 OP 311122.3

That is Peak Time 1.426 GB , off peak 311.122 GB and that is up to today, the 13th of the month

They pay £13.99 for that tariff

Good to hear of the 22 GHz licensed stuff , have Vfast tried out the Air Fibre product yet?, it has its uses for short haul links , problem is we do not have many short haul links!

cheers

Bill

Thanks for the update Darren, looking forward to seeing what packages you will be offering shortly. I shall fire off an email to support next month as I have a couple of questions.

Cheers

Hi Bill,

Not bothered trying the air fibre, the "allowed" frequency we can use is to narrow to get the full potential and i think for the cost there are other devices that can go further, faster. Like yourself , we have very few short links . Will have a have a catchup soon, got some interesting stuff going on tying to make the EC believe non "hard wired" broadband can still be NGA ! I think what BDUK is doing to wisp's across the country may be ilegal.

Hi Darren,

Yes i agree, a catch up chat would be good, the BDUK fiasco and the way it discriminates against genuine competition should be illegal even if it claims not to be.

I think you also need to factor in the public funding of market 1 ADSL exchanges to the tune of £100,000 each in West Sussex this year, despite all three having a 16-30Mbps service already from Kijoma. , 2 for nearly 8 years, 1 for 4 years (it had a wifi mesh mess before, public funded too).

I have been collecting evidence over the years if that helps.

Count me in on the EC NGA pursuit, it is something I have been battling here independently as so far none of the "groups" seem to consider Kijoma's input as important


cheers

Bill

In reply to a post by darrenorbital:

Hi Bill,

Not bothered trying the air fibre, the "allowed" frequency we can use is to narrow to get the full potential and i think for the cost there are other devices that can go further, faster. Like yourself , we have very few short links . Will have a have a catchup soon, got some interesting stuff going on tying to make the EC believe non "hard wired" broadband can still be NGA ! I think what BDUK is doing to wisp's across the country may be ilegal.