Irish Broadband -ther verdict?

The_B_Man

lol classic rant. started off complainng about IBB frequencies and ended up complaining about ur car tax!

Reku

Drapper wrote:

I've bee speekaing with a few work collegaue and I've kinda established that:-If your off a mast that has "fibre" liking it to the Inex your pings are sweet and your DL/UL's are perfect. If you come off a mast that is radioed to another station then your latency and UL/DL are poor. Seems to be just a few mast:-

Ballycoolin
Bray
Ballymun
any others?

People of the RTE and UCD masts are perfect and a few others over on the Southside.

Upgrading the mast woulod improve things considerably and limitiing the number of people connected to the station.

I can see 5 IBB ariels from my house now whereas before I was the only one (until I got rid of it) in the area!

Well if you're saying that the Ballymun mast is a bad one, I'm pretty sure I'm on it yet (considering my location and the direction my mast is facing), I'm getting good upload/download rates (test as >1.5K most of the time, with an actual download rate of ~100k), just rather high pings. Doesn't seem to cause any issues for me WRT my on-line gaming, so I'm happy enough.
Think I'll see about posting results from a speed test and ping check when I get home tonight, as I've said, it would be good to get everyone to put their results together so as to see if the issues are localised or individual.

*Edit* After looking carefully at the IPs that come up for ping plotter it looks like I'm actually on the Ballycoolin mast (WTF!? I just 15mins from DCU and the dish thingy's roughly pointed at DCU), I can only assume the Ballymun mast doesn't show up with a title.
Anyway, I'll post up a few test results from the irishisptest site...

Sponge Bob

Lunchy wrote:

On installation, ping times to the closeby Clondalkin node ranged from 6ms to 350ms. They installed the Alvarion kit, left the power to FULL, when i asked the installers about setting the power level, they looked puzzled. They left the link transmitting 100,000 times (50dB) the required power to get to the node.

Is this full on AND with antenna gain on top Lunchy.

It would seem to me that IBB are swamping the 5Ghz band in Dublin through their ignorant behaviour which is totally illegal .

Comreg should be called in to investigate this if you have hard evidence they are doing it.

Canaboid

I seem to remember when I had IBB over a year ago that there was a potential issue with interference from a neighbour who had his own wireless link set up. An IBB tech said that he may be exceeding the legal power output causing the interference but there was nothing they could do as they exceeded it themselves.

Treat this as hearsay and don't quote me on it.

Lunchy

That's the problem with unlicensed links, the installers dont calculate any of the variables, but instead set the power to max. With integrated kit (Antenna and transceiver supplied as a single unit), the TX power is set to a ceiling so that when added to the antenna gain, it does not exceed the maximum allowed power (EIRP) for the country of operation. This can be done because the Antenna size (and gain) is known. But if the kit has no intergated antenna, then the TX ceiling can not be set at, and it's left for the buyer to set depending on the Antenna gain he's going to use, in this case you can set the TX power in excess of the maximum allowed EIRP.

Apart from this, different countries have different EIRP limits and some kit can simply be set to a different country.

Unlicensed links are not Carrier class systems, to get that you need firstly your own frequency allocated by Comreg, (2 of them as these links are Full Duplex with data in both directions at same time), and you calculate the exact power required to create no errors (1x10 -6 errors), and also the width of the signal and therefore the height required of the heads etc, but the difference is you can install and forget about it.

Thats what IBB should be running from their Nodes, as a lot of the problems are because the Nodes themselves are unlicensed (as opposed to the access links to the customers themselves)..

Even if they used Satellite links for the Nodes, the network would be better than it is not. (be it with higher latency, there would be no lost packets).

At present IBB have agreed to reimburse me for half useless network.
Have forwarded them the requested ping windows and am now awaiting
that LARGE concession.

Sponge Bob

The EIRP figure in Ireland is 2w including antenna gain but the antenna is supplied with the subscriber unit

see

http://www.alvarion-usa.com/RunTime/Materials/PDFFiles/BA%20VL%20Datasheet%20ver%20H.pdf

IBB's installers are doing this because IBB told them to do it .

Lunchy

Since the Alvarion Kit comes with an Integrated Antenna with a known gain of 21dBi, the TX power should be limited to +12dBm. Instead it goes to 21dBm. Allowing anybody and everybody to transmit 9 times the limit. The thing being that everybody gives themselves the excuse to do it that everyone else is. It seems the Limit is set at this to reduce interference caused to sky scanning Space Telescopes, the closest being in the U.K. (Cambridge and elsewhere), with others in Germany.

It all points to one thing, IBB should have Node connections running on Licensed Links that actually work and can be relied on 24x7. Even using lower MTBF kit which would cost a lot less (than higher MTBF), would create a network that worked, with the only issue being the access link, which can be calculated for, excluding potential interference. Which is the very reason why you should calculate for the TX power and reduce any potential interference to other links.

Sponge Bob

The fact that they are making valuable spectrum unusable for themselves and for everyone else , particularly in the major cities where most 5.nn Ghz links are , would strike me as worthy of some proactive spectrum regulation before the spectrum is completely swamped .

Mind you that would require consistent Comreg action, some chance It certainly would not happen on Ofcoms watch across the water.

Lunchy

58Ghz can be used at present and is unlicensed, it will only work over distances of 1km. After that the attenuation caused by the atmosphere reduces the signal below working levels. Thats the reason you dont need a license as there's 100 channels to choose, allowing that many within a 1km distance. And since the freq is so high, the link speed is also, so you have data flowing in both directions at same time, most 5ghz kit is half duplux (data in one direction then data in the other (TDM)). The problem is any equipment I've seen is Carrier Class, need to find some cheap kit.

Another advantage is the antennas are the size of your hand (the higher the freq, the smaller the antenna for same gain).

So keeping a look out for same.

Lunchy

http://www.dragonwaveinc.com/main.asp?id=products&page=airpair100

Sponge Bob

is 24ghz in the EU not allocated to car radar collision avoidance uses, I shudder to think of IBB with a tower near the Mad Cow.