WiMAX?

[Huxxx]

Does anybody has any information about this new wireless technology?
I'm mostly interested in ping times for it and how good is wireless stuff for gaming at all.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Have not seen it yet...it'll be spreading fast...especially when Motorola really jumps on board. Were I work, we provide Motorolas Canopy system to many of our business clients in the city my office is in. Latency is quite low...it's basically a wireless T-1 that can go for a couple of miles..and this year we'll be rolling out a 15 meg wireless Canopy pipe across a body of water (11 miles) to a small school on an island. It should be a great technology when they roll it out.

[Huxxx]

You may not have this low latency in numbers? Today standers for a low latency are under 15ms.
My local cable provider gets 5-6ms and my local ADSL provider 12ms.

Now I know this waves are damn fast approx light speed so even faster then in an optical line but the conversion to an usable data and encryption can make it as high as 40ms to first loop.
Now 40 would be at last 2 times to much for gaming if you consider it as damn fast symmetric broadband compared to competition like Cable or ADSL.

[YeOldeStonecat]

You may not have this low latency in numbers? Today standers for a low latency are under 15ms.
My local cable provider gets 5-6ms and my local ADSL provider 12ms.

The main impact on this will be the ISP itself...similarly to current broadband and any other connection type. Some ISPs, especially the cheaper ones, will tend to oversubcribe..so no matter what connection you have with them, performance may suffer. Quality ISPs will not oversubscribe their bandwidth.

I don't have actual numbers of latency for the current Canopy system we have, just a good seat of the pants feel of the connection when I go onsite, as most of our business clients are being shot a 2 meg pipe for their office, with a 40 meg DS3 providing the gateway for all of them.

[Shinobi]

The main impact on this will be the ISP itself...similarly to current broadband and any other connection type. Some ISPs, especially the cheaper ones, will tend to oversubcribe..so no matter what connection you have with them, performance may suffer. Quality ISPs will not oversubscribe their bandwidth.

I don't have actual numbers of latency for the current Canopy system we have, just a good seat of the pants feel of the connection when I go onsite, as most of our business clients are being shot a 2 meg pipe for their office, with a 40 meg DS3 providing the gateway for all of them.

Yosc, You think WiMax will become the Wireless standard over 802.11x ?
For home and bussiness.. LAN / WAN ?
I hoping, in the long term, there would be some cross compatiblity with older 802.11x and WiMAX.. I know that's kind of wishfull thinking... because of differn't freq's not to mention speed and methods all together..
I'll go for the WiMAX if it comes as cheap as the current 802.11 spec,
in the near future.

Sorry if I hi-jacked the thread a bit..
Kind of looking at the same thing in the future..
'Always in motion is the future'

Shinobi

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yosc, You think WiMax will become the Wireless standard over 802.11x ?
For home and bussiness.. LAN / WAN ?

From what I've read, no it's not looking to replace it, rather, co-exist with it. WiMax will be more a means of getting internet to you/your building, instead of phone/cable/T-1...it's basically wireless broadband access, much like the Motorola Canopy is right now that we use. Once it's brought into your building, you put your router in place, and do what you want with it...be it wired ethernet, or 802.11g or n, whatever.

Consider it more a "point to point" system...although you'll see it spilling over into access for PDA's and laptops (instead of something like Verizons Sierra cards).

[cyberskye]

WiMax is 802.16

There are no plans to make it compatible with 802.11 - the frequencies required to reach the target range are generally above the 2.4Ghtz band - as high as 11Ghtz.

Look for combo cards one day, maybe, but know that your current 802.11 gear will be no more compatible than 802.11a and 802.11b

[Huxxx]

Yes Wimax is presented to us as an alternative to ADSL and Cable. It promises to be as cheap or cheaper then cable of same level in download terms. Only that it will be symmetric and thats what I want. Great upload speed. But yet I'm not to convinced in the quality of this, strength of signal and the level of timeouts. On ADSL right now I have to quality with low pings.

The question is only if this is really that good for lets say hosting a game server or just good enough for simple ftp and web stuff due to latency issues.

Right now I have myself ADSL 4M/512 and its already maxed out what I can get on my location. Not even ADSL2+ will help me to get any faster since the speed level falls with distance dramatically.
So for the time being I will look into cable as it promises to be 5M/786 and being so its even cheaper then lower class ADSL since we are forced to have ISDN if we want ADSL and thats almost 50% of my current ADSL packet on top of it. ADSL on itself is already more expensive but since now we didnt really had good cable speeds here.
The only problem now Is if I go for cable I will be bound for 2 years to them and if Wimax comes anytime sooner I will be lets say it fcked up pretty much.

The problem is there is no exact date, data or even information who will bring something out. Even our local town ISP is testing some sort of Wireless 10M/10M stuff but yet they dont give any Info not even the name and the only thing I heard is they developed it them-self what I can hardly even believe.

I dont know much about wireless stuff at all only that my Laptop pings to my router with 2-3ms.

[cyberskye]

Yes Wimax is presented to us as an alternative to ADSL and Cable. It promises to be as cheap or cheaper then cable of same level in download terms. Only that it will be symmetric and thats what I want. Great upload speed. But yet I'm not to convinced in the quality of this, strength of signal and the level of timeouts. On ADSL right now I have to quality with low pings.

The question is only if this is really that good for lets say hosting a game server or just good enough for simple ftp and web stuff due to latency issues.

Right now I have myself ADSL 4M/512 and its already maxed out what I can get on my location. Not even ADSL2+ will help me to get any faster since the speed level falls with distance dramatically.
So for the time being I will look into cable as it promises to be 5M/786 and being so its even cheaper then lower class ADSL since we are forced to have ISDN if we want ADSL and thats almost 50% of my current ADSL packet on top of it. ADSL on itself is already more expensive but since now we didnt really had good cable speeds here.
The only problem now Is if I go for cable I will be bound for 2 years to them and if Wimax comes anytime sooner I will be lets say it fcked up pretty much.

The problem is there is no exact date, data or even information who will bring something out. Even our local town ISP is testing some sort of Wireless 10M/10M stuff but yet they dont give any Info not even the name and the only thing I heard is they developed it them-self what I can hardly even believe.

I dont know much about wireless stuff at all only that my Laptop pings to my router with 2-3ms.

Your questions are not really about the technology, rather (as YOSC said) the ISP that implements them.

Cable where I used to live (comcast WashDC) the pings were around 100ms. The technology has limits, but the ISPs implementation (architecture, line quality, number and quality of routers/POPs) made all the difference.

Not all ISPs will implement as symentric, I'm sure. Any transport offers the capability of symetric...

[Huxxx]

Well my questions are about the technology and only about this.
I know already that my cable provider and ADSL provider are both of highest quality there is.

I don't know what Wimax is or will be since this is pretty new and since it will be global I bet it will be top quality. So my questions are not about the quality of an ISP but only how would Wimax considering its top quality stand against ADSL/cable in terms of latency, weather, fog, lightning etc.

If the ISP wont be good quality it wont be able to stand against the biggest ADSL provider here which is basically that provider who is forcing others to offer bigger packets. You can see if we wouldn't have this provider we would still be stuck on 64kbps cable around here. Now ADSL forced cable to go as high as 5Mbit/1Mbit.

I have checked and there are already offering 2M/2M wifi on some locations but on on this locations what means they most likely only have one transceiver.
WimMax on the other hand wants to go global and with doing so it must be high quality or it will fail.

So you can imagine I don't want to hear it depends on the quality of your ISP at all.
I'm just interested how powerful the technology itself is nothing else.
There were some reviews done about Wimax and that ISP but all failed to mention anything else then down up speed. They said they tested 3M/3M in a distance of 1700meters from the transceiver and that they did direct there antenna in another direction to see if it still works and it did work only with abit of delay.

Till yet I couldn't find any information of value about this, for example. Will it be for gaming or just download. How big the latency will really be and can we expect the signal to be stable all the time or not.
I guess I will know this starting next month when they will start selling it in the first town.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yes Wimax is presented to us as an alternative to ADSL and Cable. It promises to be as cheap or cheaper then cable of same level in download terms. .

At first it will be as a business solution, not marketing the home market. As mentioned above, we (where I work) offer the current similar technology, Motorola Canopy system. When I'm onsite at my clients offices, it really is like a solid T-1...and we shoot the beam to a few clients over an appreciable distance.

It will trickle down into SOHO and some higher end home solutions, but I don't expect to see it go toe to toe with DSL and able...since we see entry level packages due to price wars now at around what...$14.99/month for DSL these days, cable pretty close too.

True symmetrical bandwith will always be expensive...no matter what means it arrives to your doorstep.

The quality of it will all be up to the provider...as to their setup, which brand equipment they purchase, etc. Wimax is just the standard, it's up to the provider to choose what brand equipment they want, and that's a big determining factor of the quality/performance. Are they going to put some el cheap 130 dollar subscriber module up on the roof? Or a nice 600 dollar unit? It always will come down to the quality of the ISP, or provider. The technology is sound, who, and how they implement it, is the variable.

[Huxxx]

At first it will be as a business solution, not marketing the home market. As mentioned above, we (where I work) offer the current similar technology, Motorola Canopy system. When I'm onsite at my clients offices, it really is like a solid T-1...and we shoot the beam to a few clients over an appreciable distance.

It will trickle down into SOHO and some higher end home solutions, but I don't expect to see it go toe to toe with DSL and able...since we see entry level packages due to price wars now at around what...$14.99/month for DSL these days, cable pretty close too.

True symmetrical bandwith will always be expensive...no matter what means it arrives to your doorstep.

The quality of it will all be up to the provider...as to their setup, which brand equipment they purchase, etc. Wimax is just the standard, it's up to the provider to choose what brand equipment they want, and that's a big determining factor of the quality/performance. Are they going to put some el cheap 130 dollar subscriber module up on the roof? Or a nice 600 dollar unit? It always will come down to the quality of the ISP, or provider. The technology is sound, who, and how they implement it, is the variable.

Well Wimax is marketed as a home end user system just like ADSL/cable here.
Next month they will start selling it in our capital. It already has 40 receivers placed all around that town and within 2 years it will cover the whole country. Director said it will be everything from 1M/1M up to 10M/10M.
The price for 1M/1M will be aproxx 20Euro and 2M/2M around 33 Euro. We pay about same for cable/ADSL with much lower upload speeds.

You can also get Optical connection on some places 3M/3M for 23Euro but its not covered good yet.
It can operate just like cellphone network but latency will be higher then and speeds slower or direct view.

But yet I still dont know what pings to expect. For the time being I will more likely move to Cable from ADSL now since I reached my physical limit here.

[m00n]

I've heard about many pilot WiMAX projects during 2006. Any WiMAX users in this forum?

[lenwest]

The largest DSL provider (Bell Canada) and cable provider (Rogers) in southern Ontario have joint ventured to roll out wimax as an alternative.
Larger cities in southern Ontario have had the service for about a year and a major expansion of coverage is scheduled for April/May 2007.
See http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060402-6507.html
They sell you a modem that can be used in any location across Canada that has wimax coverage, which appears to widely expanding. It's particularly useful for people who move from place to place and for those in communities not served by cable and DSL. I have been looking at it for my cottage at the lake.
You could also see http://www.bell.ca/shop/Sme.Sol.Interne ... .Home.page
The service is now available in 54 cities across Canada and a major expansion is slated for this spring. It's more expensive than the traditional cable or DSL.