NLOS Amongst Other Things

The story of my pursuit for high-speed Internet access in our country home continues. When we last left the story, I was reeling from traumatic stress disorder brought on by Bell’s inability to appropriately determine eligible DSL services for my phone number.

My therapist is helping me through this very difficult time. I will get through it.

I was really pleased with the number of folks who emailed me with their suggestions. Thank you.

I decided to give my current provider an opportunity to update me on their progress with the random nature of my “high-speed” service. And I found out some very interesting technical information.

I am on a Non-Line-Of-Sight service that broadcasts on an unregulated 900MHz frequency. At best this technology can provide a maximum throughput of 3Mbps. It can never provide 4 – 7Mbps which is what I was told when I bought the service. It also explains why I am experiencing such a wide range of results in download performance. The towers are heavily subscribed and the saturation impacts relative performance. In fact, the best speed I have ever measured on this service is 1.6Mbps. Typical performance is 500kbps. Sharing that pipe with two or three other users in the house drags performance down even further.

I decided to call the local dealer for Xplornet. They are neighbours and their office is down the road. Okay. Down the road about 5 kilometers. Nonetheless, they are confident that they can rig me with a Line-Of-Sight service on the 2.4GHz band and get me up to 5Mbps.

The site survey is next week.

Our house is on a hill. I plan to climb up the roof and see if I can spot their tower. I fear that this is my last hope.