User: C0mputer-G00r00

WiMAX report for Nevada

On: Australian WiMax Pioneer Calls It a Disaster

Here we have AT&T's Pahrump, NV WiMAX Test rollout... A year ago it was an average of 300 Kbytes/second down AND 128 KBytes / Second upload speed. Not great, better than anything else in town, except the DSL downtown. Given we are about 4 miles past where DSL would be acceptable, we are happy with WiMAX as it was first introduced. - SPOILER - Month by month, as new customers were added, our speed dropped over 1 year to 2/3 of it's former glory... The brand of WiMAX in our town is rated by the manufacturer for a total throughput of 71MB/s,,, that is per WiMAX tower, (per unit installed there) which is 1 for each of the 2 towers in our town... AT&T admits they have 200 customers per tower... 71MB/s divided by 200 customers = .355MB/s (This number must include failed packets and other overhead related to wireless traffic) If we went by our average inbound speed: 350 customers all sharing equally would be 202KB/s averaged... There is now noticeable latency, but not much.. So, equipment used, and node loading seem to be the big issues here. Late at night, when the town's children are sleeping, speeds return to last year's all night... Can you say Peer to Peer? (Bit torrents or otherwise) While the rolled out speed and the eventual speeds are reasonable, they could be much better with less loading per WiMAX node. If I compared this to a 54Mbit link to a cable modem (Comcast in this case, and outside of our area) it is extremely slow, but better than anything else here... While on vacation in Washington State, I had opportunity to borrow some of the neighbor's unused bandwidth... with my laptop some 800-900 feet away... I could easily pull 650KB/s... Before returning from vacation I let them know their wireless router was unsecured... and of course they had had no idea. The point here being I was not even noticed as but a drop in the bucket of their 8+Mbit/s connection... I hardly ever used the maximum I COULD draw off them, until the night before I was to return... ____ Next subject: MESH 802.11S where S stands for sucks... Mesh sounds good, until a few users start using Bit Torrent clients... Anyone saying they can be stopped is wrong... here is why: encrypted protocols and multiple and non-standard ports.. If a way is found to stop or slow torrents either legit torrent users will sue over the blockage or a new protocol will be adopted that hides it's contents better.. Only the sheer number of connections gives it away. Would you be willing to stand against lawsuits for blocking a pay service, for legal music or movie delivery? I doubt it... I do not doubt that someone will eventually be sued in just such a case... I pity the one doing the blocking. If I were to use one of the legal online movie services, Torrent or not, and my movie I had paid for were interrupted or made unwatchable, you can bet I would have a lawyer in a heartbeat. Selling a 8Mbit/s cable connection and then telling the customer they can't use it to it's fullest is not going to be lokked at as a fair business practice... Providers would be better off renaming their service according to the continuous speed they will tolerate, not the maximum. Call it 2Mbit cable, and provide more for short bursts and a reasonable amount of movie downloads, or start a legal site whitelist that is free to join upon showing that the content is legal for download... There is no invasion of privacy here, if the sites are not logged, but allowed free access by the provider's cable or other high speed customers... Of course this is /. so there isn't much chance of my words getting anywhere... Enough said for now...