iBurst Speed Question

[tjandies]

Good Day

Would clear line of sight of a tower (distance approximately 4km) guarantee 1Mbps iburst connection speeds? Would latency also improve or would that depend on the number of users connected to the tower?

I am contempalting getting Iburst and I can see the Midrand tower from Blue Valley.

 

[alchamy]

Yes, Yes & Yes.

LOS will improve your speed more than anything else, latency will also improve however both will still be dependent on the tower load.

 

[doublefrangelico]

LOS hasn't really worked for me and without knowing what the tower-load is, I suppose I had a bad latency level.

Roodekrans tower with 2.5-3KM distance and perfect LOS and a directional antenna gives me 35KB/s max dload speed

Kayalami tower with 3.5-4.5KM distance and perfect LOS and using only the modem without a directional antenna gives me 55KB/s max dload speed

The same PC and settings were used in both tests.

That doesn't make sense and is frustrating. Can anyone list possible causes?

 

[TheRoDent]

Tower load. Backhaul contention.

 

[Raithlin]

Would not distance make a difference? Sure, I'm not line of sight, but I'm in Noordwyk, and I get high latency as well as low(ish) speeds (20-30KB/s). As always, test before buying.

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

20-30kb is really bad, and youre getting 4-5 lights.... same as me. Maby a high-gain antenna would help you? I didnt realize IBurst could be that bad from one tower to another, all the towers in Cape Town seem to work fine.
By the way i dont think 1mb is really gaurentted at all, but you might well get it with a good LOS and 4km from the tower, but not during the day. Latency will definately improve if you are closer.

 

[mic_y]

hmm, I am in Lonehill on the Kyalami tower, and it is quite far away, with no LOS. I get good speeds with the standard WBS panel antenna (90-120 at night - during the day u ppl use all my bandwidth jj). so i cant really say that LOS is all that important for good speed. latency is quite high though (in the region of 130ms to myadsl.co.za)...

 

[alchamy]

I am 10km from the tower with partial LOS, I have the patch antenna supplied by WBS and get 1MB with ease in the evenings and local latency is under 100ms.

 

[seburn]

try at 2am and at 2pm see the difference ... see the contention