Looking for Fixed Wireless Internet Info?

tukkayoot asks: "I live in a rural area where cable and DSL aren't available. I want some form of broadband Internet access that doesn't require that I move. There is an ISP in my area that offers fixed wireless, but they make no effort to market it to residential users (even though they claim the service is available). Unfortunately, searching the Internet seems to yield more information about starting a WISP than what an ordinary Joe like me should be doing to educate myself about this service, as a customer. I don't have high confidence in the ISP to walk me through the entire process, so is there anybody out there that can direct me to a resource on consumer wireless related issues, like how I should go about receiving a signal when my house is surrounded by lots of fairly tall trees?"

Comments

Re:Satellite Broadband?

[GigsVT]

You can get two-way satellite that doesn't require a land line for upload.

I have Starband, it's about $800 startup fee, then $60 or so a month. Ping is a minimum of 600ms, so gaming is out of the question.

It's mostly only good for downloading files and browsing the web.

been there, done that

[condition-label-red]

I have an 802.11b wireless link to my ISP that traverses 7 miles line of sight. Performance is pretty good with sub 10mS pings to the ISP router. The biggest problem is that there is only a T1 on the back side and it servers all of their customers in that town. I can tell when the kiddies get home from school ;-)

Things to consider:

1. you must have good line of sight between both ends of the link
2. even minimal trees will block the signal if they are located within the fresnel zone on either end (try google and Fresnel Zone Calculator) I had to get out the ol' chain saw.
3. downlink performance is pretty easy to get, but uplink requires better effective power. Downloads will suffer due to uplink ACK bottleneck. Also, any interactive sessions will drag.

As for my equipment, I have a 24dBi antenna with a 500mW amplifier mounted on the roof. This puts me at the legal limit for radiated power (unlicensed). Inside I have a Linux based CPE router. It uses an Orinoco wireless card. All of this with installation set me back about $1k a year or so ago. With this setup, I usually sync at 2Mbit to 5Mbit rates. Also, rain/fog seems to have no effect.

My primary use is VPN back to work. I primarily use VNC, PuTTY, and Mozilla IMAP; no games. Performance is pretty good, except when the T1 gets saturated. My goal is less than 50mS ping to my company's gateway; and I usually get this during off hours. Downloads range from 60KByte to 160KByte from kernel.org.

The more (real) help you can get from your ISP, the better off you will be. Also Seattle Wireless is a good place to start learning about wireless issues. Bottom line, it can be done fairly easily (if you have the right physical situation) and the performance is much better than the dialup you probably have now. And there are many more extreme working examples than mine.

Good luck!

Have you called them?

[wizman]

I co-own a primarily wireless ISP. One of the main reason most WISP's mainly cater to business is the equipment cost. A "good" client install generally costs several hundred dollars, and most 'residential' customers are used to paying less than 100, or anything, for the modem and install, as is usually the case with cable and dsl.

If you are behind a lot of thick trees, you will most definitely need your antenna to be above them. We have gotten by with strapping 20 foot of mast pipe to a chimney, or using existing towers. Sometimes you can get signal through the trees if they are fairly sparse, but your reliability will greatly diminish.

If you're within several miles of their tower and you can get a clear line of sight to them, and if they know what they are doing, you should have no problems whatsoever.

One thing to watch out for -- a lot of ISP's who offer wireless really don't know much about RH (the 'wireless' end of things). We have an RF engineer on staff, and without him we would be nowhere. I would ask some questions about how THEIR towers are setup. There are many important things that network guys with no RF experience do not take into account -- proper waterproofing, cable loss, amplification and preamplification, etc. Some WISP's will install high power amplifiers with lots of receive gain to extend their coverage area, but that extra receive gain can be a real pain by amplifying noise and reflections, so proper care and consideration needs to be factored in.

Even if you don't know what the answers should be, you can judge how knowledgeable they are about the RF design of their network and whether or not it is properly done by their answers just by how 'certain' they sound when they answer.

If you'd like more info, shoot me an e-mail. I'm fairly certain you are not in our coverage area, so this isn't a sales pitch. :)

-dot- net