Bell Sympatico High Speed Unplugged

Posts: 37 · Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 7:37 am Post subject:

By design, shared Wireless connections such as the Bell/Rogers offering are very bursty - especially during times of congestion. This means that your connection to the internet is served in time slot bursts. Satellite based user experience very similar issues albeit with more latency.

Posts: 105 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 105

ve3sy wrote:

By design, shared Wireless connections such as the Bell/Rogers offering are very bursty - especially during times of congestion. This means that your connection to the internet is served in time slot bursts. Satellite based user experience very similar issues albeit with more latency.

That is not my understanding. WiFi is like that but WiMax is designed to accomodate real time stuff like Voip.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 13, 2010 Posts: 3

Mustardman wrote:

ve3sy wrote:

By design, shared Wireless connections such as the Bell/Rogers offering are very bursty - especially during times of congestion. This means that your connection to the internet is served in time slot bursts. Satellite based user experience very similar issues albeit with more latency.

That is not my understanding. WiFi is like that but WiMax is designed to accomodate real time stuff like Voip.

I've been using Vonage for several years and bell unplugged business service in the country for just under 2 years.

Speaking from experience, bell unplugged is a good option for high speed Internet if you're in the country with limited connectivity options or a mobile user that travels where wimax towers are available. The download/upload speeds are acceptable and even torrents can be made work stable by limiting the global maximum number of connections and maximum connected peers and upload slots per torrent to low numbers.

That being said, the latency is VERY INCONSISTENT. I generally use google.ca as my benchmark to ping and find that if I ping google.ca -t and let it run constantly to monitor the latency that it fluctuates (50ms for several seconds to 500 ms for several seconds to 1500ms for several seconds to 2000-3000ms for several seconds) Here's the tail end of a sample snippet right now at 11:00pm on Thursday May 13th, 2010 pinging google.ca:

Code:

Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2618ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2821ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2546ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3020ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3003ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2904ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3082ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2615ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2342ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2730ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3034ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3416ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3432ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=3082ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2927ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2986ms TTL=53
Reply from 66.249.81.104: bytes=32 time=2874ms TTL=53

Ping statistics for 66.249.81.104:
Packets: Sent = 4250, Received = 4213, Lost = 37 (0% loss)
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 40ms, Maximum = 3557ms, Average = 1063ms

This is with the portable modem mounted inside at the peak of a barn in the country - the barn sits on the top of a hill (very high up) and the modem gets a steady 5 signal bars mounted in this location. There were no torrents or downloads happening in the background and after power cycling both the wimax modem, router and PC I still get the high pings.

Here's a sample of a traceroute taken 25 minutes after the above sample pings were taken. The first hop is a linksys wrt54g router running openwrt firmware and the connection to it has always been rock solid, the problem starts on the WAN side at the bell unplugged modem:

Code:

Tracing route to google.ca [66.249.90.104]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms barn [192.168.1.1]
2 1457 ms 1944 ms * bas21-toronto12_lo0_SYMP.net.bell.ca [64.230.197
.212]
3 1456 ms 1522 ms 1745 ms dis11-toronto12_Vlan121.net.bell.ca [64.230.159.
141]
4 2303 ms 1817 ms 1689 ms core3-toronto12_GE11-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.159.1
7]
5 1915 ms 1992 ms 1916 ms newcore3-toronto12_POS0-12-1-0_core [64.230.158.
61]
6 1539 ms 1771 ms 2141 ms core3-toronto63_POS0-2.net.bell.ca [206.108.107.
141]
7 1673 ms 1637 ms 1723 ms bx4-toronto63_so-0-0-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.160.1
22]
8 1436 ms 1574 ms 1710 ms 74.125.48.89
9 1104 ms 927 ms 1046 ms 216.239.47.114
10 1216 ms 1173 ms 1137 ms 216.239.46.170
11 1448 ms 1379 ms 1315 ms 209.85.241.222
12 1367 ms 1170 ms 1192 ms lga15s04-in-f104.1e100.net [66.249.90.104]

Trace complete.

I have found times where power cycling does help latency but it is not always the case as it didn't help in the example above. A lot of the time I'm assuming traffic from other users connected to the same tower cause the ping fluctuations but have no way to confirm this but I can vouch that bell unplugged service is consistently inconsistent. Occassionally between 3:00am - 8:00am I get 50ms-100ms consistently (even while downloading torrents and/or large linux operating system .iso files via http or ftp or streaming youtube videos)

For this reason Bell Unplugged Business Edition is not adequate for Voip calls. It's too unreliable for video games, Voip or anything else that requires low latency transmission of packets.

With Vonage I've always used the SimulRing© option combined with my cell phone and for this reason I've left my Vonage Voip box at a relatives house in town on a stable bell dsl modem and am primarily using Vonage for advanced voice mail functionality and to direct calls to my cell phone for now. For this reason I may be looking to another provider in the future who can offer these lesser services a la carte for cheaper unless Vonage can offer just these hosted services at a reduced rate like some of their competitors do.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 13, 2010 Posts: 3

In my research I've found the same reports from other bell unplugged users so I'm not alone in my claims. I found this response to someones question about bell unplugged:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090402143137AANrXfQ

Quote:

As far as latency, the internet has what it has - changing providers doesn't change the internet.

Whoever posted this is ignorant when it comes to bell unplugged wimax. If I take out the factor of "the internet" and just ping the first hop within Bell's internal network which is 64.230.197.212 in the traceroute I posted above I get these results:

Code:

Ping statistics for 64.230.197.212:
Packets: Sent = 145, Received = 138, Lost = 7 (4% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 830ms, Maximum = 4115ms, Average = 2574ms

Here's an additional quotation from the same person in that post:

Quote:

If you have a bad path to the game server, you have a bad path - getting a "better" provider won't change where you live, so it won't change your path.

The above statement is true, however in this case since the latency occurs within bells network before it reaches the Internet it invalidates that claim in this instance and I've monitored bell unplugged at various times over the past 2 years and have found the results at two locations I lived at to be the same, even on different towers with 4-5 green LED's lit up on the modem.

That being said, while I was traveling in Ottawa, Ontario I found LOTS of wimax towers were setup there and I often got a consistent low 50ms ping there even during business hours even when I only had 1-3 green LED's lit up on the modem which leads me to believe that the tower + number of users on the tower affects latency and performance.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 13, 2010 Posts: 3

Sorry for the triple post, but I'm trying to be helpful and provide as much information as possible. Here's the results on speedtest.net to the closest server to where the tower I'm located is (taken at 12:09am on Friday May 14th 2010):

Using Bells own internal speed test (http://206.47.199.107/) I get:

1296 kbps down
401 kbps up

at this link (http://internet.bell.ca/index.cfm?method=content.view&content_id=15561) I get:

1138 kbps down
230 kbps up

This service is the Bell Business Internet Unplugged claimed to be up to 3Mbps down and up to 384Kbps for $60 CAD + tax per month with Unlimited Monthly data transfer at the time of these 3 posts.