How Reliable is 900Mhz Wireless Internet?

amrust asks: "I live in an area that currently is not being served by broadband in any way. Local ISP's are discussing bringing Wireless Internet into our area, and for some of the more difficult to reach places, they have mentioned 900Mhz being used. I was wondering how reliable/secure the 900Mhz spectrum is for Wireless Internet, and if anybody has some comments on experiences with 900Mhz wireless internet that they can pass on?"

Comments

It's so reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

That I'm currently typing this comment usi

Phone Frequency

[rritterson]

I don't have any personal experience with 900mhz, but i do know that it is the same frequency that cordless phones use. Some phones today use 2.4ghz and they cause interference with .11b and g (my friend's neighbor has a phone that is so powerful it knocks my friend offline everytime the neighbor turns it on.) There are many more 900mhz phones that 2.4ghz phones, so I'd assume the problem is worse.

However, you are in a rural area, so maybe the congestion on that band will be somewhat less (We live in a major metro area).

It's perfectly secure

[anthony_dipierro]

All the sniffing software is written for the 2.6Ghz range, so you can rest assured that no one other than you and the intended recipient will be able to read the message.

Re:I would assume...

[dJCL]

Based on my phone experience, I've owned and generally used both a 900 and a 2.4 phone. The 2.4 sounds better close in and can get a good secure connection to the base station within about 100+ meters of my base station. On the other hand, my 900 was quite capable of connecting to me when I was over 250+ meters away. The connection quality was pasable, but the range was great.

The reason they are probably using 900 is for connection distance. The same equiptment will cover more users with probably less bandwidth, but that is a price to pay.

As someone else noted, security of the connection has nothing to do with the frequency, so just discuss that with the provider. As it is, still 80% of the wireless networks that I run into are even setup with WEP(mine is not, but I have other ways) and most are default settings, so if the provider even tries to put in some security, no one will bother with them unless they have a reason.

Enjoy!

Try Google groups

[klui]

Just picking up from the first page yields some tidbits. Range, reliability; Interference.

900 mhz is just as good

[r00tdenied]

Most WISP's use 900mhz where there is a substantial amount of tree cover. 900mhz can penetrate the tree canopy much easier than 2.4ghz because of the wavelength.

2.4ghz has a problem with dense water, and in tree leaves their is significant amount to cause multipath reflection. Multipath reflection is caused when the wavelength of any given radio signal is short enough to be relected by the water molecules.

At 900mhz the wavelength is much greater than 2.4ghz so it doesn't have as much difficulty.

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so unreliable that I just stole this guy's password and am now posting as him.

Anecdotal

[Jahf]

I listened to Bill Joy talk at a conference in Aspen where he went into fair detail about the 900MHz system they had installed there long before 802.11b came about (if anyone remembers seeing a story about an Aspen cabby with a totally connected neon taxi cab, he was using this system for his net access).

Anyway ... for long distance penetration through anything other than air, 2.4GHz plain sucks (I'm using a WISP now and occasionally when strong winds hit I have to give up working for awhile ... shame). Mr. Joy did mention that they weren't able to get more than a few hundred Kb/s out of their system, but that was acceptable for a few dozen people sharing a single T1 and the system sounds like it was rock solid stable.

If you only have one choice (or if you consider a normal dialup line a choice maybe 2) then that is definitely not a bad one. I think I would actually prefer my 2.4GHz ISP to offer 900MHz as an option. Instead they're switching to 5GHz for high-end use ... though since their 5GHz access point doesn't have trees between it and myself and it is far less war driven I will probably switch to that anyway.

Re:I would assume...

[innosent]

The important factor here is how efficiently the signal can pass through a medium, and how directional the signal is. We don't live in a vacuum (if you didn't know this, you might need to get out once in a while :P), and therefore any signal sent has to travel through any objects in its path, including the air. Not sure exactly off hand which law of physics covers this, but lower frequencies lose less energy when passing through a medium, and are also less directional. Think about sound here, a low frequency (bass), say 40Hz will have relatively no problem passing through an object, like a car driving in front of your house at 2:00A.M., but a high frequency (treble), for example 10kHz is highly directional and has great difficulty traveling through objects.
I believe this is due to the fact that to pass a signal through a medium, the particles in the medium must be excited to the same frequency as the signal, and it takes significantly less energy to excite a material at a lower frequency than it does at a higher one. Higher frequencies give higher fidelity, but are less resistant to signal loss.