Wireless Broadband Buying Guide

Buyers' Guide to Wireless Broadband Contents

• Wireless access
• Availability
• Wide-area broadband providers
• iBurst
• Unwired
• BigAir
• Performance
• The future: WiMAX

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One of the key advantages of wireless broadband is, of course, the ability to take your Internet connection with you. Although many people think that all wireless broadband services are mobile, an important distinction needs to be made, between mobile broadband and portable broadband. Even fixed wireless broadband (ie, confined to one building) is portable because you can move anywhere in the building and have constant access without being confined to a power point or external modem.

Portable broadband means that you can access the Internet anywhere within a certain coverage area. This normally means that you are in a hot-spot, near a base station or have an antenna to connect you to a base station.

Mobile broadband is a newer phenomenon and one which is growing rapidly. Mobile broadband enables you to access your wireless broadband while on the move, meaning you can use it while on the train, bus or ferry. In Australia, true mobile wireless is available through iBurst's technology but this is set to change with the introduction of WiMAX (more on WiMax later).

If mobility is important, be careful to check with your ISP about mobility options. OzEmail, for instance, which resells both Unwired and iBurst, makes the distinction between mobile and portable wireless Internet. Veritel, another reseller of both services, calls its Unwired service "fixed wireless Internet," while its iBurst product is called "mobile wireless Internet." (Incidentally, we find the Veritel nomenclature a little confusing, since it is possible to take the Unwired modem from place to place and use the account wherever you may be - you just can't use it while actually moving).

WiFi Hotspots

The idea of being able to access your wireless broadband outside your home began with Wi-Fi hotspots. These are places where you could go and (if you had a subscription to the service) access the Internet from your notebook through a local Wi-Fi access point. Wi-Fi hotspot services are still around, especially in cafes, restaurants and other public places. A number of service providers, such as Telstra, Azure Wireless, Optus Connect, SkyNet Global and iPrimus, have set up networks of such wireless hotspots around the country. To access the Internet through one of their Wi-Fi hotspots, you need an account with the provider and a standard Wi-Fi (802.11b or g) network card in your notebook or PDA. Some providers will have 'roaming' partnerships with other providers which further extends the coverage available. For example, SkyNet Global will let customers use its own hotspots plus those of its partners which include Telstra, Azure and Unwired. Check each provider's website to view a map of their coverage.

However, wireless hotspots have largely fallen out of favour as wide-area mobile broadband services gain popularity.

Led by iBurst and Unwired at the present time in Australia, these services offer metropolitan-wide reception areas and broadband speeds of up to 1Mbps. A single iBurst account, for instance, gives you broadband access to the Internet from nearly anywhere in metropolitan Sydney or Melbourne (along with several other cities as the network constantly expands). This is made possible by their network of aerials which act like uber Wi-Fi access points, delivering blanket coverage of wireless networking over the metropolitan areas.

Wireless access

With wide-area wireless broadband services, you have one account, which you use to access the Internet from your home, office, park, or even on the train. As long as you have your modem and a PC, and are in a coverage area, you have Internet access. This is a major benefit to those who move around a lot, or want to have one Internet account for both work and home.

Wide-area wireless broadband providers have been careful to keep pricing parity with ADSL services. You can't get quite as good a deal on wireless broadband as you can on ADSL, but the gap is narrowing. With wireless, prices range from $50 to $80 per month for a 512Kbps connection and a reasonable quota (5-20GB), and around $100 per month for a 1Mbps connection with a similar quota. After reaching your quota, most providers either restrict you to dial-up speeds for the rest of the billing period or allow you to buy extra volume at a fixed price.

While we're not covering it extensively here, there is another solution for users to whom coverage or mobility is paramount: using the mobile phone network data services. All the major mobile phone network providers offer GPRS services, and some offer 3G data services that can deliver Internet access at near-broadband speeds. However, these are not consumer services; at present GPRS and 3G are extremely expensive (in some cases over a hundred times more than consumer Internet access) and targeted primarily at businesses.

Availability

The availability of wireless broadband works very much like that of mobile phones. If you're in range of a wireless receiver (equivalent, in this sense, to a mobile cell tower), then you have an Internet connection. If not, then you have nothing. In some cases, you may be just in range but have poor or intermittent reception, which might result in slower than normal speeds. You do not need line-of-sight to get reception.

Each of the providers has a range of wireless receivers stationed around their coverage areas. Unwired, for instance, claims to have enough receivers to cover the homes of more than 90 per cent of the population of Sydney.

The most important thing to look at when choosing a wireless broadband provider is whether they have coverage in all the areas you might want to use your broadband connection. You need to check with the provider very carefully. At the moment none of the major providers have anything like mobile phone coverage, but they do cover the most densely populated areas of the major cities. If you want mobile phone-like coverage, you need to look into GPRS or 3G data services.

If you're in a marginal reception area, such as the outlying areas of the major cities, you may find the connection drops out occasionally, as weather patterns and other interference wreak havoc with your wireless connection. For this reason, we recommend only going with service providers that have some kind of money-back guarantee for those who can't get good reception. You don't want to be caught with an Internet connection that only works half the time.

Wide-area broadband providers

An increasing number of Internet service providers have begun offering wireless wide-area broadband services. This is somewhat deceptive, however, since in Australia at this time there are only two major network providers. Most ISPs are resellers of the iBurst and Unwired services (iBurst, in fact, works entirely through resellers, and has no direct retail offering). The user experience from one reseller of a service to another should be very similar - it's only the pricing, support and extras (such as Web space and email addresses) that will distinguish providers.

For an excellent breakdown of the various pricing plans available, we recommend visiting www.broadbandchoice.com.au.

If you're buying wireless broadband, it's a good idea to find out which network the service provider is using, since there are significant differences in the technology that each uses.

iBurst

iBurst (www.iburst.com.au) is the first true and most established mobile wireless broadband service. The company behind iBurst, Personal Broadband Australia (PBA), purchased 5Mhz spectrums in every capital city in 2001, while other telcos were still focussing on Wi-Fi hotspots.

By July 2005 iBurst networks have been built that cover Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle, The Central Coast, Melbourne, Brisbane, The Gold Coast and Canberra.

iBurst does not have a direct retail presence, but sells through a large (and growing) number of resellers, including OzEmail, Link Innovations, Veritel, SecureTel, People Telecom and others. Each provider offers their own plans. They tend to be slightly more expensive than Unwired plans (or have smaller volume quotas), but are more widely available and have several other advantages, most notably mobility.

Like Unwired, iBurst offers speeds of up to 1Mbs download, while the peak upload speed is 345Kbs. This data rate can be delivered to desktop-size or PC Card modems.

iBurst uses IntelliCell technology from American company ArrayComm, which makes it possible to access the internet while in motion. Tests have shown that it works well, even when travelling on public transport at speeds of 70km per hour. If you're a notebook user, the ability to purchase a PC-card modem and use the Internet while on the move is a major benefit of iBurst.

Unwired

Unwired (www.unwired.com.au), is a Sydney-based service that, offers speeds up to 1Mbps to homes and businesses in their coverage area. The maximum upload speed is 256Kbps. The coverage area includes most of metropolitan Sydney which can be checked with their test available on the Unwired Web site. Unwired offers a 14-day money back guarantee if coverage does not include your area.

Unwired uses proprietary technology from US firm Navini Networks to deliver data to end users. This technology requires the use of a rather bulky modem that plugs into a PC via USB or Ethernet. The modem is about the size and weight of a reasonable hardback novel. There is no PC-card option, so notebook users will have to carry the full modem around.

Unlike the iBurst technology, you can't use the services while actually mobile. You can take the modem, and thus the service, from place to place, but the services will not work while in transit. However, when Unwired moves to WiMAX, as is planned, this is likely to change (more on WiMax below).

Unwired sells directly through various ISP resellers. The pricing for Unwired is on-par with most land-line based Internet services, and includes a quota of up to 12GB per month (with additional GB blocks of usage available for purchase), with excess usage shaped to lower speeds. Several Unwired resellers offer even greater volumes and lower prices.

BigAir

A third network provider, BigAir (www.bigair.com.au) recently made a debut in the Sydney area. Offering what it calls fixed wireless networks, BigAir uses a Wi-Fi variation to deliver data to the home.

BigAir customers require a roof aerial with direct line-of-sight to a BigAir base station. As a result, BigAir is neither mobile nor portable - services are only offered to a fixed location (in this respect, BigAir is no better than land line services). The company has set up multiple base stations around the Sydney CBD to distribute 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz signals to receiving customers. Once the signal is received at the building, it is distributed to the customer via standard Ethernet cable or high speed DSL modems. At the end of May 2005, there were 10 BigAir base stations around Sydney.

BigAir offers plans starting at a $29.95 for 1Mbs symmetrical, but the real appeal of the service is the top-end plans, which can cost up to $500 per month but deliver 10Mbs upstream and downstream data rates. Some recent enterprise customers are even getting 100Mbs data rates.

Performance

The big question on the lips of most people interested in wireless broadband services is: do they perform as well as landline services? The answer is yes and no.

Tests of the Unwired and iBurst services soon after their release showed performance that lived up to specifications. If you had a 1Mbps connection, you actually got very near to 1Mbps throughput. However, the services are still quite new, and their potential to scale is the real question.

In a sense, wireless broadband is a shared medium - there's only so much radio spectrum to go around, and you're sharing it with everybody else who's in the same area as you, accessing the same cell. As the number of wireless subscribers increase, there's going to be less bandwidth available per person, especially at peak times. This is true, of course, of all Internet access media, but for wireless broadband it's a difficult problem to solve. With landlines, a service provider can simply increase the bandwidth capacity of the cables that make up the network core; with wireless they can increase the number of receiving stations or purchase more radio spectrum, but a question mark still remains over the ability of the long-range wireless services to scale to hundreds of thousands of users running at high speeds.

The other key issue, from a performance perspective, is the latency of wireless services. Latency, sometimes called "ping times," is a measure of the responsiveness of the network -- usually measured in milliseconds. Where bandwidth measures how much traffic a link can handle, latency is a measure of how long it takes a single message to get to its destination.

For the most common Internet applications - web surfing, downloading, email - latency is not a big issue. However, it's a huge issue with real-time applications such as online gaming, video conferencing and Voice over IP. With real time applications, delays in transmission are unacceptable. For Voice over IP, latencies in excess of 250ms will start to make a phone call very painful.

Early testing has showed that existing wide-area wireless broadband services do not perform well in terms of latency. Practical tests have shown that you can expect latencies of around 70ms-200ms for Australian sites, and 250ms+ to US and other international sites. By contrast, with ADSL those numbers are more likely to be closer to 20-50ms in Australia, and 200ms+ for the US. If you're a heavy online gamer or plan on using VoIP services, we recommend sticking with land lines for now, however this will change very soon.

The future: WiMAX

At the moment, the major wireless service providers are using proprietary technologies to deliver data to users. That is set to change in the near future with the impending ratification of the IEEE 802.16e standard, a.k.a. WiMAX.

WiMAX works much like the current Navini and IntelliCell technologies. Local aerials act as wireless access points covering a very large area. Each access point, or cell, can cover an area of 3 to 10km in radius, so relatively small numbers of them could blanket an entire city.

It's unclear at this stage what kinds of speeds the introduction of WiMAX will offer the end-user. Up to 40Mbs is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. In practice we expect that the introduction of WiMAX will prompt service providers to offer speeds of 2Mbs or more. It will also reduce the cost of the modems, since they will be standards-based and not proprietary, and it's likely that many new notebooks will actually have 802.16e capabilities built in.

Depending on the implementation, WiMAX can deliver mobile (as opposed to portable) services, although these may be at reduced speeds.

WiMAX is expected to be certified this year, and Unwired has plans to implement WiMAX in its network once the standard is ratified.

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