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July 29, 2005
Thumbs Up: Nextweb
A customer at the very far edge of DSL availability (on a 192k/128k profile, but not even getting that) finally had this horrible circuit go down for good. In a panic to have email working, I installed a router with modem backup, and they operated their office network on dialup for a week while we evaluated other options. That sucked beyond words.
A T1 is expensive and takes weeks to install, and it doesn't seem that cable internet was available. But I'd gotten a cold call from a fixed wireless ISP sales guy about two weeks before, and I figured there was no harm in looking into this as well. I was generally skeptical about wireless internet, mainly out of ignorance.
A lot of pointed questions and reference checking later, plus the on-the-ball responsiveness of the sales team, we decided it was worth a try. We ordered one megabit symmetrical service from Nextweb for $249/month, with 24x7 support and a reasonable SLA. It includes 5 static IP addresses.
One day later the techs were onsite, installing an antenna on the roof pointed at a local water tower that had their base station. A few minutes after I showed up I had plugged in the IP address information to our router, and we were up and running.
The tech temporarily left the service uncapped to demonstrate what the service can do: it's amazing. Running a speed test at BroadbandReports:
Dude!
This is strictly temporary; the circuit will be turned back to the paid-for bandwidth, but it was very helpful to see that we're not on the fringe of coverage, more speed is available if needed, and that there is plenty of margin for us. We're seeing six millisecond latency to the first hop.
There is nothing about this service that has not been absolutely superlative: the sales team, installation team, and the technical performance of the circuit. It's been running for 18 hours now with not a single dropped packet that I can see. None of the IP addresses is on any spam blacklist either.
Only time will tell whether this plays out for good or not, but I could not be more encouraged about a technology I've just become familiar with. A big thumbs up to Nextweb (especially Alan, the sales guy); I'm looking into them for several other customers.
Posted by steve at July 29, 2005 07:00 AM
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Comments
I've evaluated just this sort of solution for the company for which I work. While we didn't choose that service, I do know of many who have with great results. In our area, the wireless protocol is standard 802.11x. They had a few growing pains at the beginning, but thier reliablility exceeds that of our T1. There is one customer, however, that has trouble keeping a tree properly pruned. :)
Posted by: Dean in Des Moines at August 1, 2005 06:43 AM