Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Dialog BroadNet - WiMAX Installation

Yestday we got the WiMAX connection to our office from Dialog Broadband. Here are some pics which was taken when its installed.

WiMAX Antenna

WiMax Antenna.

WiMAX signal strength

Configuration was simple. They connect the laptop to the antenna / control unit using a web browser and Ethernet connection, like how you configure a DSL router. After that they configured the frequency for the cell.

WiMAX Antenna installation

Even though, WiMAX doesn't need line-ofsight to work, they have to turn it around to get the maximum signal strength. They said even the reflection of the single would also work.

Initial speed tests

The purchased package was Ultra which should have speeds of 4000kb/s for download and 1000kb/s for upload (theoretically). These tests were done by connecting a single PC.

It doesn't have the promised 4Mbps speeds, but currently it has fairly decent speeds. Hope they will maintain the same quality in the future. ( At least half of the promised bandwidth as its shared bandwidth :-( )

Anyway I got 450Kbps on FlashGet for downloads from download.com using 10 threads


Here is a presentation from dialog which has the details of the available packages.





Flash presentation would take some time load. Pls wait or check it @ http://www.slideshare.net/koolb/dialog-broadnet-brief/1

11 comments:

nirudha said...

Hi,

They mention a common firewall feature, I wonder if this means that inbound connections are dropped (as would be the case if they used NAT) or some other restrictions are in place compared to SLT ADSL for example.

Nirudha

koolb said...

Currently we have hosted mail/ftp/web servers inside the network. Further some web services have been hosted on custom ports for testing purposes. So far there not have been any problems in inbound or out bound traffic.
But DialogBB had some problems in the SNR rates and some engineers from the foreign network equipment supplier visited our office to diagnose and optimize the connection. It was around 16dB SNR on downstream but they were able to increase it to 32dB for both directions.

nirudha said...

good to know they are tweaking this.

have you noticed any link quality changes due to weather? might be too soon to say.

also what times did you do those speed tests at?

GNS said...

Hey,

first of all I wanna know about Prices...

because some ppl said me WiMAX charges on Downloaded Data Basis & someone said it's not..

& how much on installation?


PS: I already sent a mail to your MSN account... ;)

GNS said...

Hey,

first of all I wanna know about Prices...

because some ppl said me WiMAX charges on Downloaded Data Basis & someone said it's not..

& how much on installation?


PS: I already sent a mail to your MSN account... ;)

koolb said...

Gayantha,

Prices are same as they given in the presentation and there are no quotas etc. It’s a fixed price for the maximum bandwidth. But only problem I see is that they only say its "SHARED". Therefore there are no QOS ( Quality of Service) guarantees. It could be zero to maximum bandwidth. I think DialogBB should come up with minimum QOS levels in there agreements in future. Because any international ISP has some QOS level guarantee in the agreement and its enforced form there consumer protection laws. But it’s very unfortunate that not a single ISP in Sri Lanka gives any QOS guarantees for Broadband connections

Koolb

koolb said...

Nirudha,

As other wireless technologies it has problems related to radio singles. But as I understood in Wi-Max they have created software and hardware to dynamically adapt to these problems. I have seen it changes modulation from QPSK to BPSK vice versa. But I don’t think its stable as a Microwave link but it’s intelligent at different level of the network stack to adapt to different conditions.

Note - Please correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not a network/ engineer

Koolb

nirudha said...

I got the 2mbps package yesterday. While doing initial tests I actually got up to 1.6mbps (bittorrent) downloads and I was REALLY happy.

But after a few hours my speeds dropped to sub 200kbps (more like a home ADSL package) and it has not gone over that since then.

I was convinced it must be a SNR issue for such big difference but all the technical support guys seem to be spoon fed the term "shared bandwidth".

Quite a disappointing performance so far. Hopefully we can track performance as more users come on board.

Anonymous said...

I got the 1 Mbps package installed at my place and the quality of service has been pretty good so far.

This morning I tested the connection speed during heavy rain and it was a little bit slower. Not sure if it's due to bad weather or the increased traffic during office hours on a weekday.

nirudha said...

hey Tao,

What is the maximum speed you can get on a large download using a download manager (and multiple download streams)?

Unknown said...

in Iran wimax price starts from 100$ for 128Kb/s per month wichis too expensive.