My husband and I are thinking of telling our cable company where they can stick their co-ax. Our current, internet-only service is running over $94 a month. If we choose to upgrade to the new version (we’re grandfathered in) it will cost $109.
Only one company is allowed to provide cable where I live so shopping around is not possible. But a new company has entered the ring: Fixed Point Wireless. They charge half the price and offer speeds up to 60mbps.
We have line of sight to the tower from our attic but we also have a few questions. Do any Dopers have experience with FPW? Is bad weather ever a factor? Will we get good coverage in our house? What are we not asking that we need to know?
The company is called Blade Broadband. When we run a speed test we’re getting around 50 mbps. Blade offers 60 mbps. Blade does not appear on any lists. I’m wondering if In the Stix changed their name.
I have comcast. I would LOVE to tell them where to stick their cable.
The key is how clear the line of sight is from the tower to where you will place the receiver in your house (the attic, I assume?). If there are trees that can blow and block the line of sight that could cause signal loss. Wireless uses radio waves and not visible light, but still, wet leaves can block radio waves. Rain and fog also tend to cut down the signal strength. If you are reasonably close to the tower and have good signal strength it’s no biggie, but if you are farther from the tower and have less of a signal margin you could experience issues in bad weather.
While AT&T and some other big names are getting into FPW, a lot of the providers are just small companies and can be a bit hit or miss with their technical skill levels and quality of service. On the other hand, practically anything is better than comcast (seriously, if someone started an internet company here and called it Joe The Asshole’s Internet Service and claimed to have poor customer service I’d still consider switching). Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
And because FPW is often a small company, there can be concerns about how thick their trunk line is (i.e. where they connect to the internet). A 60 Mbps connection to their wireless network doesn’t do any good if they have too many customers for their trunk and everything gets throttled at the routing point out of their network.
FPW is also usually more susceptible to outages than typical cable systems. Cable internet systems typically have redundancies in the network. FPW typically has fewer redundancies with most customers being on long strings of point to point radio links. If any link goes down, any customer from that point onward in the string goes dark. How quickly they fix broken links gets back into the technical skill and support that the company provides, which can vary greatly.
I have never heard of Blade Broadband so I assume that it’s one of the smaller companies. They might be good, they might not. See if you can find any reliable local reviews.
You never know, they could end up getting bought out by someone like comcast in the long term. I intentionally signed up with suscom when I moved into the house I’m in now, and I chose them solely based on the fact that they weren’t comcast. A few years later, comcast bought them out, along with the only other internet provider in my area. Comcast isn’t really in the FPW market yet, but if they start fearing it as competition they could go after it.
There are no reviews available for that company as far as I can tell, not even on Yelp or the Yellow Pages.
Also, is the “60 Mbps” offered the average speed, or the top speed?
Blade was established in 2015 and that’s pretty much all I can find out about them. their tower is only 3 miles away, if that. As for speed, the packages offered don’t mention if it’s top speed or average speed.
Sorry I can’t be of more help but this is what I have to work with. And I REALLY don’t like our current cable co.
109 for just internet is ridiculous unless you’re in the sticks, and even then it’s awful. I pay 45 per month for 100 megabit service in the Detroit area.
The antenna is $159 up front or $7/month. Our current router should be ok. Our quoted “out the door” price is $57.41 if we rent the antenna, $49.99 if we buy it outright.
Comcast is much easier to deal with if they have serious competition. When I lived in PA, Verizon came through and wired our subdivision with fiber. From then on, if my Comcast bill went up all I neede to do was call Comcast and utter the magic worsd - “retention” and “FIOS”. They’d set me up with the latest new customer promo deal. Did this a number of times.
In AZ now I have Cox. My bill goes up, I call them and say, “I don’t like how high my bill is” and they basically say, “Glad I’m not you.” CenturyLink does not have a competing product, unlike Verizon in PA.
One point of data, we’re paying $79.99 for Gigabyte speed from Verizon.
It really is amazingly fast. I ran Cat 7 from the unit to a switch in my office and then to my PC. I get speeds over 900 Mbps down and over 600Mbps up.
Slightly off topic, but may be relevant soon - I’ve seen mention that the coming Starlink satellite service will be $99/mo. HOWEVER! It talks to a satellite passing about 300 miles overhead; so the speculation is that in urban areas, it would be not so good if tens of thousands of people try to share one or a few satellites. However, in less populous areas it would make sense, the speed would be better.
I recall something similar in Canada - a client was in an industrial park, so not serviced by cable and the phone company DSL was abysmal since they hadn’t updated the wires in decades. They were lucky to get faster than modem speeds and wet weather affected the speed. They switched to a radio-based internet much as you describe, and the result was far better. The only limitation was that the contract at the time (about 4 years ago) was by tier, how much data they used per month. So, for example, doing a backup of their data to the internet was still not economically feasible even though the speed was adequate. To be fair, this makes sense because the receiver tower’s total throughput is limited and has to be shared to all customers in the area.
If you plan to use things like Netflix or Prime (or Disney) look for usage caps or surcharges and be sure the service satisfies your needs.
I’ll do that, thanks. Where I live I can’t use an over the air antenna because the terrain blocks the signals. Without cable or internet streaming we get exactly one tv channel and it has crappy reception.
In urban areas like Manhattan one should theoretically be able to get 500 Mb/s, 1000 Mb/s or even more using 4G and 5G wireless technologies because the short range is not a problem. Not to mention it should be easier to get an actual residential line (fibre).
What the heck, when I signed up for this a while back, it was 99.99/month that’s what I’m still paying, but I see that rate of yours online now. I can never keep up with this stuff.
Here at least, they’re getting more price pressure from Optimum and Comcast. Also AT&T is planning a 5G roll out to homes over the next 2 years. So I think this pushed Verizon to give more speed for less price.
I had a friend who had that kind of service. He liked it as long as not too many people were using it at the same time. He said the bandwidth dropped after 3 when all the kids got home from school. He upgraded to the business class service so that his packets had priority and he could maintain his bandwidth. But other than that, it worked great for him.