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

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.

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?

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

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.