WISP: Ripoff or is it my end

[rob19841]

hello,
i recently signed up with a WISP, do to the fact that i now live in a rural area. the installation guy showed me how fast i would download at with a speakeasy.net test, that day i was gettting 875KB/sec transfer rate, and i was happy. That only lasted for a few days after i agreed he install the motorola wirless radio. now for the last week i have only gotten speeds up to 104KB\sec. note: this is also a burstable connection. my main problem is that when downloading torrents im only getting around 1KB\sec down, during late nights i will get sometimes up to 400KB\sec. does this sound like throttling, because he told me that he never throttles his connection and that i should never go below a 3 Mb/sec, or a im have a issue on my end? any knowledge on WISPs would be appreciated.
thank you

 

[john-b691]

I assume you are using the motorola canopy system? This in general works very well. Do you have access to the radio to see if you are getting errors. Most the issues are signal levels. It is common to see these radios mounted on old satelite dishes to increase the signal.

Since it is time of day dependent I suspect you are competing with your neighbors. This system unlike regular wireless actually can control which radio can transmit and when. This is done to more fairly share the bandwidth. So even if they don't limit if they only have say 5m total the system may prevent you from hogging 3m of it to give other users a fair share.

I would also suspect you are being impacted by how bit torrent works. It open many tiny connections for short periods of time. If you are taking a lot of errors you may be better off using one of the proxy for torrent so all your traffic goes to a single session.

 

[rob19841]

I assume you are using the motorola canopy system? This in general works very well. Do you have access to the radio to see if you are getting errors. Most the issues are signal levels. It is common to see these radios mounted on old satelite dishes to increase the signal.

Since it is time of day dependent I suspect you are competing with your neighbors. This system unlike regular wireless actually can control which radio can transmit and when. This is done to more fairly share the bandwidth. So even if they don't limit if they only have say 5m total the system may prevent you from hogging 3m of it to give other users a fair share.

I would also suspect you are being impacted by how bit torrent works. It open many tiny connections for short periods of time. If you are taking a lot of errors you may be better off using one of the proxy for torrent so all your traffic goes to a single session.

but should it be getting as low as 1.5m on a speed test even when im payong for 10 to 14 for $75/month. also do you have a tutorial of how to use a proxy with utorrent. Would the usenet possible go faster then?

 

[john-b691]

If you cannot get into the radio have them remotely log into the radio. They can see if you are getting errors. They have some ability to adjust the transmission power the radio. Also ask them how strong you signal is compared to others. They have a couple of reflectors that increase the signal...the larger ones being satelite dishes.

No ISP will ever guarantee bandwidth. With WISP there are all kinds of bottlenecks. Many times you may have to jump from tower to tower using radio backhauls to get the point they have a connection to the hard wired internet. The more they do this the more you share bandwidth with all the other users. If the backhauls are going many miles they may only have 10m total.

Little you can do when they are the only option they can charge what they like and most people will just pay it rather than have nothing. 3G/4G if its available would be your only other option but those have expensive bandwidth caps on them.

Your best bet is to seach for torret proxy. They are implemented in a couple of ways so you have to read how each does it. These are primarily used by people who have ISP that block or limit utorrent or are trying to hide illegal download history.

 

[rob19841]

Best answer selected by rob19841.