Wireless Internet with VeroLan in the Broadlands

Yeah it was on Verolan but it was just a fluke...Today, back to reality:

2003-12-24 11:25:37 EST: 635 / 248
Your download speed : 635661 bps, or 635 kbps.
A 77.5 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 248539 bps, or 248 kbps.

 

Those of you that didn't leave Verolan....still having problems?

I can't download files or stream media without the connection failing. As a result, I can't download system updates or security patches. Most of the time the connection is okay, slow buy okay, but the minute I put any sort of stress on the pipe it completely stalls, pings stop, etc. A few minutes later it comes back, but by then the download has failed, etc.

 

Verolan service is gone to sh1t...

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest...999f1b14e620;2.0;wdc.speakeasy.net/1076124411

I can't keep a reliable connection up. Completely unusable. Khalil wants me to buy an amplifier, but I am looking for other service.

 

I haven't had any problems at all with Verolan for at least 5 months. It did take several tweaks there for a little while to get it right, but lately my connection has been consistently good, even during peak usage hours.

2004-02-07 19:45:56 EST: 716 / 248
Your download speed : 716314 bps, or 716 kbps.
A 87.4 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 248077 bps, or 248 kbps.

 

I'm out.

Glad that some of you are having luck with the service. Consider this my last input on the matter.

1) Khalil thinks part of my problem may be the distance from the tower. He indicated that the weakest signal gets the lowest priority, so I am contantly fighting for the AP's attention. The solution recommended was a $300 or a $500 amplifier (not sure which price as I was quoted both).

2) When the service was good, it was reasonably good. When it was bad, it was horrible. Even at its best, I never got close to the speeds I was paying for. When the service had issues, I would drop to below modem speeds. I also had several outages that lasted throughout the entire day (two of which happened when I was trying to work from home) which made the service unacceptable for me.

3) Despite the problems I had with the network, I found Khalil to be a reasonable and honest business man. He made many attempts to get the service working correctly and was always responsive when I called with issues (even if weather prevented him from taking immediate action). His willingness to try and make it work was what kept me on board so long. When I decided to terminate the account, his response was very supportive and fair regarding the terms of the contract cancellation.

4) As of Monday, I've got a T1 into the house. Expensive, but I well worth it for me...

best of luck...

Matt

 

I have to agree with the dedication that Khalil has to his customers, but I think that irregardless of his best efforts, the network in Ashburn just isnt capable of meeting expectations at this time. I may comeback in the future and revisit this as a possibility, but maybe by then there will be other options.
BTW (if you dont mind), what is your T1 costing you? Last price I had seen was about $600/mo. including local loop.....a little steep for me I think....


DwArFlOrD

 

I have not posted in forever, been having a baby!! But I felt like I should way in here for a second. I have identified some of the problems with Khalil's network and sent him the information, but he apperently has not tried to fix it. First, he is using directional antenna's on the tower. Directional on the house is great, directional on the tower sucks. If you go look at the RF properties of those antenna's you will notice that very few houses are in the "sweet" spot. Based on that you will have a very fragile connection to the tower very prone to "noise". But that is a minimal point.

The main issue he is having is Bridging Loops. As far as I can tell he is not running any kind STA (Spanning-Tree Algorithm) to solve this problem. Remember there is no routing on khalil's network, it is one big bridged mess. That means there are no broadcast boundries, etc. He also has repeaters all over the place. My guess is that somewhere he has developed a loop that brings down the network.

I helped him run some tests awhile ago, I would put exactally 500K of traffic on my bridge (Verified with a hardware network sniffer), and the access point would start at 500K of usage and then very quickly saturate at 11Mb. I would stop the data, and the bandwidth on the accesspoint would fall back down to 0. Very typical of a loop somewhere.

Anyway I thought I would chime in on this. WiFi is a very complicated technology to get done correctally and Khalil has made some critical mistakes that will end up killing the network, but beyond that, he REALLY needs a good network admin to solve his network topology issues.

Steven