Vonage and Wireless Broadband??

Posts: 25 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 14, 2004 Posts: 25

My co. is getting rid of cable internet access and beginning next week will be receiving broadband access via a dish on the top of the building from a regional wireless high speed provider (via its tower from a top of a 50 story building 2 miles away). They claim our download speed will be 2Mbps and up 1Mps. There are are only four users of the capacity in our office and I am the only one with Voip via Vonage. Question- Will wireless like this work as well as cable (note- our cable was capped at 256 upload, so this, at least in that respect it is much better with the wireless provider)? I am concerned that there might be a time delay due to the time to transmit the signal from tower to tower before going to the Internet. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 26, 2004 Posts: 3

The distance would not caused any problems for your connection. It takes as long for the signal to get to you going 2 miles through the air as it would to go 2 miles over cable. It is probably a little more efficient since the signal is getting straight to you "as the crow flies".

If you do have any problems, it may be due to latency introduced by any security that the wireless ISP is adding to secure their connection, but I suspect that this will work just fine for you.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 06, 2004 Posts: 2

Actually I am having an experience with my wireless ISP (WISP). I actually have 2 WISP's . My primary one has great speeds (768 to 1M down, and 512 up). My secondary has poor sppeds (256 down, 90 up).

I order Vonage. Very impressed with the company and their online experience. I get the telephone adapter and hook it up to my primary WISP. The quality is terrible. I call Vonage support. They were very responsive and walked me through reseting the ATA to get new firmware. That improved the sound a bit. After trying it for a few more days, I decided it wasn't all that great. To test it on a cable modem connection instead of wireless, I took it to a friends house. The service was AWESOME! So, that means something is up with my WISP.

I get on this forum and try some port forwarding and stuff. No improvement. I then disconnect everything from my WISP except the ATA. Still crappy quality. I finally decided to try it on my slow secondary WISP. Guess what? Excellent quality!!!

What the heck? If I were keeping the secondary WISP, it would be no big deal. But their speeds are too slow for me to work from home; so, it is gettting disconnected.

Why does a slow WISP work so well when my fast one doesn't? I'm stumped. I checked their website for the list of blocked ports. None of them relate to the ports the ATA use.

So, does anyone have any suggestions on what I should ask my WISP? Without a doubt they are the ones causing the issue. I know it's not a latency problem because my other WISP works perfectly.

justbn

agingboomer wrote:

My co. is getting rid of cable internet access and beginning next week will be receiving broadband access via a dish on the top of the building from a regional wireless high speed provider (via its tower from a top of a 50 story building 2 miles away). They claim our download speed will be 2Mbps and up 1Mps. There are are only four users of the capacity in our office and I am the only one with Voip via Vonage. Question- Will wireless like this work as well as cable (note- our cable was capped at 256 upload, so this, at least in that respect it is much better with the wireless provider)? I am concerned that there might be a time delay due to the time to transmit the signal from tower to tower before going to the Internet. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Posts: 25 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 14, 2004 Posts: 25

If you or anyone here has any idea as to why please let me know now. I am moving to the wireless ISP from the cable provider on May 10, 4 days from now. It claims 1MB up and down. But you have me worried. Our cable modem connection works OK, but there are there of us here sharing a 268 upload limit, so it interferes sometimes. Any experiences with wireless ISPs are badly needed, and quick, before I am locked into a 1 year contract.

Posts: 25 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 14, 2004 Posts: 25

Oh, I do have one suggestion. It could be that your primary WISP is on a frequency where there is interference (e.g., from 2.4 GHz phones). I am told this might interrupt the packets of Voip arriving at the right time, interrupting voice quality, even though you may still have what appears to be a very solid and fast internet connection. Do you know what frequency spectrum the primary and the secondary each use?

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

Run a ping plot with both WISPs and see if you have latency or other issues. http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 06, 2004 Posts: 2

Here's an update. I am cancelling Vonage. After using it for several days on both the "fast" and "slow" WISP's, I've decided the quality is not good enough. Even on the "slow" WISP, the service is very choppy at certain times of the day.

I've discovered that I hear everyone very clearly on the "slow" connection. However, they don't hear me worth a damn. To test this, I've left myself voicemails. Then I listened to them on both the Vonage and my landline. They are TERRIBLE! So, when I am speaking on the Vonage service through my WISP, they quality is very bad.

It's simply not worth all the hassle for me. I say this only in reference to the WISP connection. On cable modem it was superb.

BTW, someone suggested ping plotter. Unfortunately, my "fast" WISP doesn't allow pings. So, I can't test that. I did however use "netstat" to see what things looked like. My retransmission rate is about 1%. I don't think that is too bad.

I've also unplugged my wireless phones and not seen an improvement in quality.

Hope this info helps others. I have seen posts by others using WISPs. They seemed quite happy. Guess there are simply too many variables to say if it will be great or terrible for any one person.