WiMAX For Business Internet?

William writes "Does anyone have firsthand experience with using WiMAX for internet access? Our company is on a T1 line right now and we are looking to upgrade our internet speeds. WiMAX seems to be the most affordable and cost-effective solution in our area [San Francisco], but I have no personal experience with it so far. How is the performance and reliability with WiMAX? I would appreciate any insight you all might have. Thanks in advance!"

Comments

Test

[MindStalker]

They won't let you try it out? Its not like they have to run any wires anywhere.

Re:Test

[TheLink]

I second that. You should test (try get a free test ;) ).

However just because the test is great doesn't mean it will be great months down the line when more users come on board.

If they have been providing wimax for a while in your area then your test would be indicative of what it might be even a year or so later. Otherwise if it's just been released, a test might not be useful.

With ADSL and leased lines the users tend to fight for their share of bandwidth (aka have contention) at the ISP's gateways to other ISPs.

With wireless tech, the users start contending for their share of bandwidth immediately after their wireless modem/device (and they still have to contend at the gateways to other ISPs).

Until the tech improves till it's cheap to add wireless capacity, this will be an important difference. For stuff like ADSL, it's actually not that cheap to add capacity - but it's typically paid for already.

Note: a lot of wireless tech doesn't do very well if it rains very heavily, I think that's not a problem for SF, but might have been for some posters here.

Re:Test

[TheLink]

Tests you can do:

Compare with your existing connection.

ping tests. Keep two pings running overnight, one for small packets and one for big packets (you can specify the size/length of the packet). Compare packet loss and latency.

Test sustained download speeds. Download an ISO. Some ISPs actually throttle after X megabytes of download or Y seconds.

We've also informally tested some wireless tech before by streaming internet radio, when the music stops you know the connection has stopped, and it did stop often, too often ;).

Re:Test

[amorsen]

They won't let you try it out? Its not like they have to run any wires anywhere. Putting up WiMAX is the expensive bit. It means getting permission to put up the antenna and installing the antenna plus the cable to the wiring closet. If there isn't an antenna on the base station pointed in the right direction, add that too. The equipment itself is reasonably cheap these days.

The WiMAX company would have to be pretty desperate to do that without a contract.

Re:Test

[GrenDel Fuego]

With ADSL and leased lines the users tend to fight for their share of bandwidth (aka have contention) at the ISP's gateways to other ISPs.

That is going to be true with ANY form of internet access. The question is going to be how over subscribed their links are.

Re:Wow

[sveard]

I've seen you do it hundreds of times

It works well

[The Ancients]

We offer it here in NZ, complete with two phone lines, and the feedback from clients has been overwhelmingly positive (possibly due to the fact connectivity here is expensive). It's not comparable with fibre, but is definitely better than frame, ADSL, and T1/T3.

As long as you go in with reasonable expectations, you shouldn't be disappointed.

Clearwire Seattle isn't so hot

[ShadowRangerRIT]

No personal experience, but my coworkers who have tried the Clearwire service in Seattle have been unimpressed. Relatively low speed (1 Mbps, or about 120 KB/s), high latency. Can't speak for San Francisco though.

Re:Clearwire Seattle isn't so hot

[Man On Pink Corner]

I'll second that. Clearwire == garbage. Useful only as a last-ditch backup service.

It depends

[Bender0x7D1]

The only thing you can do is ask people who are using your local WiMAX service.

There have been people who have been really happy with the technology and those who have terrible service. Here is a story where an early adopter in Australia has abandoned WiMAX because of poor range - less than 400m indoor and 2km for non-line-of-sight outside - poor latency and jitter. The same story also talks about another provider that has had nothing but success with it.

So, talk to local users and see what performance they get. If it is good performance, make sure you check what equipment and settings they are using. Also, check what range they are operating at and make sure that there aren't any large buildings in your way.

Bell Unplugged/WiMAX wasn't a great experience

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a 2.5ghz service that's a quiet partnership between Rogers and Bell up here in Canada, with the technology having been developed by a third company, called Inukshuk.

I experienced variable service (anywhere between 2.8 of the promised 3 meg down and 384 kbit of the promised 384 to less than 500 down/75 up), plus latency (upward of 300ms) and packet loss (as high as 18%). This service is particularly vulnerable to the number of users making use of your tower (mine became unusable after there was a 'sale' on the service and the number of subscribers in my area went up significantly). As I understand it, not all WiMax services are susceptible to the users issue, but the other thing you're going to have to deal with is the fact that a lot of these are line-of-sight based, and I'm not sure what that would be like in SF--isn't it the place with all the crazy hills, like we see in the movies? :) I think I'd be looking for other alternatives. Is there fibre available in SF? What about SDSL, or aggregating your router across multiple connections?

Re:Bell Unplugged/WiMAX wasn't a great experience

[compwizrd]

we have the service at a facility with bell, and experience similar issues.. we're about 11 km away from the tower though.

Is Clearwire really WiMax?

[transporter_ii]

Was doing a little research and found a lot of people claiming Clearwire wasn't fully WiMax. For instance, here is a recent comment I just found:

Clearwire is NOT Wimax. The existing network is in place to scale to Wimax

I have seen this question asked on Slashdot before, but it went unanswered at the time.

transporter_ii

Colombian Wimax

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad uses Wimax from Une down here in Barranquilla, Colombia. We have (I believe) the fastest package, of 2Mbits down, and 384k up. Latency is crap, I don't know why they cap the upload because AFAIK, Wimax *should* be symetric, but let's just blame that on Colombia or something. ;P

So the upload is worse than our alternate DSL solution, VOIP is crippled because of latency, and downloads completely depends on the tower nearby. Fortunately being in a 4th story apartment we have direct LOS to the tower only about a km away. We've had to call support various times, and it takes a while to fix problems, so for a business I wouldn't recommend it.

I don't want to sound pragmatic or anything

[zappepcs]

especially here on /. but why doesn't your company get a WiMax connection AND and ADSL connection and bridge them through your router?

That gives you both improved performance and redundancy in the case of an outage.

Yep, that disaster recovery planning is for small businesses also. You'll enjoy the greater speeds on normal days, and when there is an outage you'll be very glad to have the reduced performance.

Of course, that is just a suggestion. Not like I'm a CTO or anything. I just act like one on /.

Cheers

The Real Winners in Wireless

[transporter_ii]

I think one of the real benefits of WiMax will be that it will use a semi-licensed spectrum, which should really help with the interference issues being experienced with other wireless equipment in the unlicensed bands.

But if I wanted to be in any one part of the WiMax supply chain, it would be either a sales person at one of the big vendors supplying it...or the person that owned a company that sold the equipment. Or in other words, like in much of the wireless industry, the real winners will be the people selling the equipment.

We are looking into it right now, and one site can easily cost 80,000.00 dollars. With that breaking down to a 48,000.00 Alvarion base radio, coax, antennas, tower rent, etc.

Transporter_ii

Try Wiline

[ScottFree2600]

Depending on where you are in the city, Wiline Networks provides great service at a low cost and is &*%&*%@& fast! We get 40 mbps down and 10 mbps up. We pay $500 and get 8 statics. We are in the Embarcadero area.

Hit and Miss

[rueger]

My experiences with WIMAX trials in Hamilton, Ontario were disappointing. What I don't know is whether the problems were entirely WIMAX specific, or if the provider, Primus Canada, just never managed to configure things properly.

In any event now that I'm back with DSL and Cable I can really appreciate the lack of latency. No more of the giant lag with every web qaccess.

It can work excellently

[amorsen]

Disclaimer: I work for a company which resells ADSL, fiber and WiMAX (and other technologies). WiMAX lines can be very reliable when set up right. First of all, you need line-of-sight from the antenna to the base station. For business lines, forget about using units with built-in antennas for indoor use. You need professionals to install the antenna, there are lots of things which can break line-of-sight. Building cranes are a favourite...

Anyway, a proper WiMAX installation has latency less than 3ms for the WiMAX link, often less than 1ms. Packet loss is less than 1 in 10000, usually much less. In most cases you should achieve that from first installation, but sometimes it will take an antenna adjustment or a switch to a different base station before you get there.

The largest problem is interference, especially from military radars. They aren't supposed to interfere with the WiMAX bands except during actual combat, but reality is different.

WiMax Spectrum depends on carrier, YMMV

[billstewart]

Some carriers are using licensed spectrum, others are using unlicensed. There's no such thing as "semi-licensed". Licensed spectrum is less likely to have interference, but it costs the carriers money and limits where they can use it, so it's a tradeoff. From a carrier perspective, one of the things that that affects is what you can do for Service Level Agreements - the less control you've got, the less assurance you can provide, and the more you've got to worry about the service degrading.

Back when I was dealing with 38GHz wireless (point-to-point line-of-sight service), what we found was that rain fade was a big problem, so we'd offer service only up to distances that would let us maintain the SLAs given the probable rain densities - so we could get something like 10 miles in Phoenix and 1-2 miles in Seattle.

Re:WiMax Spectrum depends on carrier, YMMV

[transporter_ii]

Actually, it is kind of a semi-licensed process, because if you are the first one in the area on this frequency, you kind of get it.

The Alvarian sales person we talked to said there is basically a "land grab" going on at the moment, as people try to put up systems to be the first one in a certain area.

Also, the public safety 4.9 band is somewhat of a semi-licensed band. It works similar, because you just have to apply for a license and you get one if you qualify. However, it is still a quirky process, and you could still end up with another public safety entity interfering with you, because it isn't a licensed channel in the normal sense that we have always thought of "licensed" channels.

That's why *I* came up with the term semi-licensed.

However, other people actually use the term as well. Do a google on some of these key words:

The FCC has recently opened a semilicensed band in the 3.65GHz to 3.7GHz range. .... as 1800/1900MHz bands, and the 4.9GHz band for broadband public safety.

Re:WiMax Spectrum depends on carrier, YMMV

[Anonymous Coward]

"Actually, it is kind of a semi-licensed process, because if you are the first one in the area on this frequency, you kind of get it."
          No you don't. I mean, probably people will play nice and not use it, but there's no requirement for this. I have read about 1 or 2 cases where some other provider came in and decided to be a dick about it, and just turned the power up a little higher (or uses equipment that tolerated better SNR or the like), didn't worry a bit that they were knocking the first provider right offline.

Re:WiMax Spectrum depends on carrier, YMMV

[Anonymous Coward]

I think transporter_ii is referring to the new US WISP frequency at 3650-3700. That was just released last november, so people are just starting to use it. The FCC regulation says that anyone that wants to use it must cooperate. (the license to use it costs about $220 for ten years)

For Alvarion to push the idea of a "land grab" sounds like they are spinning it, to sell more equipment. The FCC hasn't been too specific about the sharing. Maybe the first installers will get some benefit, but the way the reg is written anybody can argue for a fair share.

Depends on Local RF Conditions

[billstewart]

WiMAX can go a long distance, and it can get high bandwidths, but you don't really get both at once, and it's going to be very dependent on the RF conditions in whatever frequency band you're using with whatever collection of buildings are in the way between you and the carrier's antenna, and on how many WiMAX users are sharing the chunk of spectrum you're in as well as competing technologies. So it can be anything from excellent to terrible, or fast to slow.

The carrier you're dealing with should be able to give you some estimate of what performance they'd expect given your location, and if that sounds good enough then try it out, unless you've got serious cost/hassle issues with antenna placement (not uncommon in big cities.) On the other hand, the buildings that are big enough that getting roof access for antennas is a problem are often big enough to have fiber in the basement that somebody can use to give you fast cheap service (also not uncommon in big cities.)

One thing I really like about wireless technologies (whether it's WiMAX or cellular or other) is that while they're not as reliable as wired service, they're usually not shut down by the same things. So that backhoe driver out on the street who's trying to find the water main underneath your fiber access isn't going to trash you wireless, and while there's another backhoe driver thinking about tearing up the street in front of your wireless carrier's antenna, chances are very low that they'll both happen on the same day.

I have WiMAX

[GrayCalx]

I am out in more rural area of Virginia and had to decide between WiMAX and Satellite. I went with WiMAX because it had higher bandwidth limits and apparently the latency was better than satellite.

So far I'm disappointed compared to my previous cable connection. The speeds are significantly slower. I'm paying about double what I used to. And I consistently go over my bandwidth limit and have to shell out a few extra bucks.

On the other side of things, at least I have an internet connection that allows me to work from home. Also there have been hardly any connection issues. Its always on, and the only time I've had to call about an outage was when something county wide happened, they got in back within an hour or two, and thats only happened twice in about 6 months. I have also been told by my company (VaBB) that they can offer higher speeds...

It depends

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends... it's just like cellular in some extent.

          A provider can put like 1 "tower" up and try to cover a huge area... in a rural area this is fine. In an urban area, the service turns to shit for both cellular and WiMax, as too many people all use the same site and it overloads.

          A provider can use sectorization (so instead of a site broadcasting in all directions, it'll have for instance 6 panels in a circle, each covering 1/6th of the way..sectorization is universal in cellular) This and quite simply putting up enough smaller sites, with enough backhaul, to handle load in heavily loaded areas, will help keep both cellular and WiMax reliable. The backhaul can also be wireless as long as the point-to-point link is fast enough, and eventually gets to a big enough fat pipe to cover traffic.

          The other part of this is keeping price just high enough so they aren't getting EVERYBODY signed up before they are ready to handle the traffic. There are cellular companies that specialize in like $40/month unlimited minutes plans -- and the service is generally quite poor. Fine if you want the cheapest service but not if you want reliable business service. For WiMax, it'd be similar -- eliminating the wires will let them sell a lot cheaper than having to lay copper or fiber out, but if it's TOO cheap they'll probably get oversubscribed.

Why Not Cable or DSL?

[gbulmash]

Unless you just can't get cable or DSL, why go with WiMax? It's neat, but business grade cable or business grade DSL can give you 3-15 megabit speeds for prices that run less than your T1 line. Is there a reason your only options are a T1 or WiMax or are you limiting yourself.

- Greg

Re:Why Not Cable or DSL?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've been told, at least in my area. If you get a business connection you'll get lower priority then someone that as a T1 line.

But for the option he's looking at I'd have to agree with you.

Works well in Vancouver, BC

[Maow]

We're using it (apparently) through MetroBridge in Vancouver (no affiliation other than a client).

We like it.

Don't know if they service your area (don't think so), but check here: http://metrobridge.net/.