Your experience will be entirely dependent upon the implementation of the suppliers network and how well the link is implemented. For example; I operated an FWA network connection across a local town for a number of years and it was effectively like stringing a fibre cable between the buildings with sustained transfer rates around 100Mbps full duplex and save for the errant tree growing and blocking the signal on one occasion it was extremely reliable. This was 802.11n days; nowadays higher performance is possible. On the flip side of the coin we had FWA broadband from a local supplier installed at one end of the link; they slapped the radio up and pointed it roughly in the direction of their tower. Saw a signal, did a rough optimisation and called it good. Signal was about -79dbm when I would have expected -50 given the kit used and suspected location of their sector. This was initially backed with a leased line and the quality was OK until they got a few more users; then performance became spotty and quality became poorer. Suspect airtime contention. Later the provider got rid of the leased line in favour of an SD WAN per packet load balanced solution, over multiple FTTC lines. At this point I jumped ship and ran for the hills because packets were arriving out of order, with deltas into the seconds at times as well as some kind of underlying retry mechanic which caused UDP packets to sometimes appear many seconds later. VoIP jitter buffers freaked out and there were all kinds of weird problems.
So at best it can probably be almost as good as a leased line, at worst it can be considerably worse than 4g. Which you end up with depends entirely on how your provider works. As a guide, if the provider offers very high speed packages on their FWA then this will at least be forcing sensible radio installation... Your mileage will vary. Alan On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 2:37 PM Ben Oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > > Does anyone here have any experience with Fixed Wireless Access? > > We have very poor ADSL in our (residential) building at the moment, people are > getting speeds of around 5 down / 0.1 up. This has been awful while trying to > work from home; I have ended up using a couple of Mikrotik WAP LTE kits with > unlimited SIM data plans instead. > > A local ISP is proposing to fit their wireless equipment to the roof to give > us 100Mb/s (not sure if this is total or per household, trying to find out. > From the website I suspect it would be 200Mb/s shared between roughly ten > households). > > Ordinarily I'd be holding out for FTTP but we're in a listed building and it's > hard to see it happening any time soon. We've been contacted before about this > but the management co. don't seem interested and I doubt there are enough > people living here for any ISP to make a good ROI. It's frustrating because > were are in the city centre, and a line runs nearby. > > My questions are: > > - Is FWA reliable enough to depend upon? > - Would it be an upgrade over my SIM card setup (where I average about > 50Mb/s)? > > Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated. They are currently trying to > measure interest and I'm wondering whether or not to get onboard. >
