Real-world performance of fixed wireless broadband?

antherem

My wife and I are looking at moving to a place where, we have just learned, the only available broadband is radio/fixed wireless. The nice gentleman on the phone said that they have, depending on your signal strength and LOS, either 3mbps or 6mbps connections on 2.4 or 5.8 ghz.

Assuming the LOS isn't an issue, what are the practical performance issues involved in radio internet? Can you Netflix/Hulu on them and have it be watchable? Can you play WoW and TF2? (Not asking terms of service questions here, just "will the connection make me want to flip a table" is what I'm looking at.)

For reference I'm used to 10/1 cable (which I love) and have used 768K DSL (not pleasant) and dialup (NEVER AGAIN.)

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

you can play games on a 3mb wireless connection easily enough; downloading games or significant patching may be something you have to do overnight though, depending on your level of patience and how much of that 3mb you're actually getting. The biggest issue for gaming isn't bandwidth, it's latency. Wireless latency is significantly higher than hardwire, and is subject to interference.

Steaming video might be problematic depending on what resolution you want to stream at.

Malgaras

3 megabits is, on paper, 4x as fast as your DSL.

Video games don't actually transfer a particularly large amount of data. Latency is your big factor here, not bandwidth, and I would say that how far away you are from the game's servers physically is probably going to be the bigger factor here unless you were using something like satellite internet.
As for download speed, 3mbps will allows you to download about a gig of data in roughly 45 mins.
Netflix streams HD video at about 3.8mbps, less for SD obviously.

As for 2.4 or 5.8. There a pros and cons to both. I would probably go with 5.8ghz as the spectrum is MUCH less crowded (for now at least). You won't wind up sharing with microwaves, cordless phones, and wireless access points of everyone around you.

The other thing to consider is that internet connections are generally "up to" whatever advertised speed. In their agreements, there is literally Zero guarantee on speed and they have no legal obligation for you to EVER hit speeds anywhere near what they advertise. How they still get away with that is beyond me. Now on the bright side, they advertised speed will generally be in the ballpark, but just keep in mind that your mileage may vary.

Dhalphir

I am on mobile wireless internet, using WiMax, (which is what most fixed wireless connections use). My latency (First hop) is around 45-50ms. Compare that with ADSL first-hop latency of around 20-25ms, cable 10-15ms, and fibre of 3-8ms.

Dhalphir

I would go for 6mbps, too. 3mbps is sufficient for a lot of things, but you won't be able to get much done at the same time as your wife. It'll be "one person using the internet, the oother one cursing"

I would avoid moving there, if you can find an alternative place. Wireless internet is NOT fun, I would not be living here had I done my research properly.

Druhim

I've had WiMax through Clearwire and at least up through the time that I dropped their service, it was very hit and miss. When I lived a mile from a tower, it was fairly fast and I would generally only have service drop out completely about 3 or 4 times a week. This is when I had relatively good service with them. Ping was also consistently high which I believe is typical of WiMax. Then I moved and I wasn't right next a tower any more, and the service got really sketchy. After several months of having the service drop out several times a day and getting less than 1 Mb/s even when it was working as well as Clearwire reps promising it would get better (as well as giving us increasingly absurd advice on how to improve the signal), we left them for good and went with DSL through another carrier. You don't mention who the carrier is, but if it is Clearwire I'd be very wary. If it's someone else, I don't have any experience with that company. But WiMax is generally much less reliable than a wired connection and I'm pretty sure high pings are inherent to WiMax as well.

antherem

Thanks, this is good stuff. Here's some basic context:
- We're looking at a house where up until a couple days ago, we'd been assured that wired internet would be available, but are now being told that the connection fees would be prohibitive (upwards of $50,000, and they do provide service a few houses down the road). So while we're pursuing escalating to give us a better number there, I'm also looking into whether wireless internet is a reasonable substitute. Where we are now we have 10/1 cable.
- It's not Clearwire, it's all local providers here. There's at least two different providers but one seems to offer much lower speeds and has more restrictions on usage.
- DSL and FiOS and such aren't offered in this area. So it's either cable or something beamed in.

It's sounding like 3 mbps isn't going to be quite enough, and 6 would be plenty. And that the reliability is based on your distance to/sight to the tower? And are there any particular quirks to wireless that would cause problems with something like streaming video? We do love us some Hulu and Netflix.

Dhalphir

6 would not be "Plenty" by any stretch of the imagination. But it wouldn't be unusably slow.

antherem

Dhalphir wrote: »

6 would not be "Plenty" by any stretch of the imagination. But it wouldn't be unusably slow.

Bad choice of words. "Sufficient", perhaps.

Dhalphir

Just keep in mind you'll probably only be able to do one significant thing at a time with the Internet. If your wife is watching Netflix you better get used to playing singleplayer games while she does.

Essee

I would disagree. My mom has 6 Mbps internet at home (DSL, not wireless). I mean I don't have Netflix, and I guess from a bit of googling Netflix really does take that much if you need 1080p, but otherwise I'm on Skype all the time with somebody and my mom regularly streams Hulu in HD and I can watch stuff in at least standard definition at the same time as all that, no problem. 3 Mbps is a bit low, but 6 Mbps is really fine unless you need 1080p desperately at all times. From the same googling I just did, Netflix handles dropping the quality gracefully enough so you should be alright. Higher speeds than this are awesome, but I really don't think it should be a big deal (except yeah, if you're streaming in 1080p you'll eat most of your bandwidth apparently).

I would really expect the inconsistent ping to be the biggest problem here, personally. I've been through that before with a wireless router that was dying and it was not pretty.

Druhim

The problem with WiMax is that it's not just a matter of raw bandwidth (at least from my experience). Yes, you may get 5-6 Mbps but you're still going to get much higher ping than with DSL or cable and it will still be much more prone to interruption and hence less reliable. I'm pretty confident you'll find your service dropping out (even if just for a few minutes) at least several times a week.

Griswold

Take @Dhalphir 's advice with this in mind:

He plays Starcraft 2 at a very high level, where an additional 50ms of latency is a Big Deal.

For games like TF2 and (especially) WoW, you'd be unlikely to even notice the difference.

Essee

Griswold wrote: »

Take @Dhalphir 's advice with this in mind:

He plays Starcraft 2 at a very high level, where an additional 50ms of latency is a Big Deal.

For games like TF2 and (especially) WoW, you'd be unlikely to even notice the difference.

I totally agree about WoW at least (not much TF2 experience). I've played on the EU servers from the US for a few years, so I regularly have 250-350 ping, and it's not a huge difference at all, despite what most people expect (unless maybe I played arena; when you get into e-sports territory it's a bit different). It's mildly inconvenient if I'm trying to melee someone in battlegrounds sometimes I guess, but eh. I only start finding WoW unplayable at like 700 ping. Now what I DO have issues with is if my connection is cutting out or otherwise having massive lag spikes, because I will either be unable to do anything for a couple seconds or be straight-up disconnected, and that's waaayyy worse than a tiny delay on what I'm doing. Hopefully the OP will get lucky and that will rarely happen.

bowen

250 ping would kill any competitive gaming. So raiding in wow and some CAL type league in TF2 (if they even have those) would absolutely kill your edge. The high pingers were relegated to the backup/weekend crew for raiding when I was doing it so, keep that in mind, playing the game and doing some dungeons, no big deal, avoiding things where it's imperative everyone survive as long as possible? Potentially a big deal.

Essee

I successfully healed heroic ICC with that ping, so it can't be THAT big of a deal, haha. And it hasn't really been a problem in battlegrounds either (but like I said, I would expect it to matter in arenas). I know that people always worry about this stuff, but once you're used to it, it's really not anywhere near as bad as people think it is. Unless you're playing from Australia. Those poor Australians are constantly shafted when it comes to trying to play with other people. (But that's often 500-700+ ping territory, and I already said 700 ping is unplayable. 500 is awkward, but I never even approach that under normal circumstances.)

Edit: I should note that the reason this is fine for me is because my connection is stable and therefore always has consistent latency. As stated multiple times, the lack of consistency would be way worse than the mild delay itself (especially now that WoW has a built-in adjustable latency tolerance). High ping usually happens when your connection is unstable.