[Gllug] Wireless kit recommendation

[John Winters]

Andrew Farnsworth wrote:
>   My understanding is that if you can hit the exchange with a thrown rock from
> your telephone line termination box (Main BT connection into the house) you
> should be able to get the full advertised speed.  Anything beyond this distance
> will result in "signal degradation" and you will lose bandwidth.

I live about 1.5km from my local exchange and my ADSL connection syncs
at the full 8 mbit.

>  Since <5% of
> the population live within a stones throw of their exchange, I think advertising
> their DSL as 8Mbps is a bit like advertising a Mini (Morris or BMW) as being a
> 200+ mph car just because if you drop it from high enough it will hit that speed.

Hardly.  For starters, no-one advertises it as being 8Mbps - it's always
"up to 8 Mbps" and most adverts are pretty good at making it clear that
that's a theoretical maximum.  I think they could add a bit more
information to give you some idea of what you can expect (e.g. how much
you can expect to knock off for each km from the exchange), but on the
other side of the coin people need to realise that just because they're
buying an "up to 8 Mbit" connection, it doesn't mean that the other end
will be able to sustain that speed too.  That's quite outside the
control of your ISP.

Most of the current press campaigns seem to completely miss the point,
concentrating solely on the simplistic observation that "up to 8 Mbit"
doesn't guarantee 8 Mbit, and getting people all worked up about how
they're not getting what they pay for when they wouldn't otherwise have
noticed that they were getting only, say, 4 Mbit.

What would be more significant to concentrate on would be:

a) Contention ratios.  ISPs really need to come clean about these.
Probably too hard for your average journalist to understand though.

b) Cases where the provided connection is nothing like the quoted figure
and will actually affect usage.  If you're getting, say, only 512 Kbps
then there's something significant wrong with your connection and you
should at the very least be getting it at a discount.  That sort of
speed *will* actually affect your usage.

c) My particular bug-bear - ISPs which advertise "Unlimited" connections
and then put disclaimers in the small print which make it clear that the
"Unlimited" bit was a lie, pure and simple.  Now that would be a far
more worthwhile area for simplistic journalists to investigate - within
their limited comprehension abilities *and* an issue about which one
could have a genuine grievance.

John
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