Air Broadband

[cambsno]

The village group is promoting Air Broadband (www.airbroadband.co.uk) which is a local East Anglian service offering fast BB using WiMax. So can get say between 10 and 30 mb BB and dont need a landline (so saving £15 a month).

Anyone else using something similar and any drawbacks?

 

[Lyonspride]

Well, not knowing a great deal about it, i'd estimate that you'd be sharing a Wifi connection with lot's of people, it'd be like a huge WiFi LAN network and they'd have a normal single broadband line to service that network.

So I guess you'll be sharing bandwidth with countless other people and subject to slow downs if people are file sharing or using high bandwidth applications. As you don't control the access point, you might have issues with port forwarding too, which means certain software might not work. Security could be an issue because it'd effectively be like a LAN network.

Like I say, I could be wrong, but I see it as being like everyone in a block of flats sharing an internet connection.

 

[neil_g]

Well, not knowing a great deal about it, i'd estimate that you'd be sharing a Wifi connection with lot's of people, it'd be like a huge WiFi LAN network and they'd have a normal single broadband line to service that network.

So I guess you'll be sharing bandwidth with countless other people and subject to slow downs if people are file sharing or using high bandwidth applications. As you don't control the access point, you might have issues with port forwarding too, which means certain software might not work. Security could be an issue because it'd effectively be like a LAN network.

Like I say, I could be wrong, but I see it as being like everyone in a block of flats sharing an internet connection.

i think its more like a mobile transmitter (i.e. a series of aerials across a town). i dont think theyd be that daft to set it as a big LAN.

http://www.airbroadband.co.uk/?page_id=8

our ISP wanted to do something similar on our work building using the fibre link into our premises as a backbone.

 

[keifster]

Trying to get something similar in our village. The company who we have been talking to want £150 connection fee and £30 pcm for 10mb connection. I think the high connection fee is putting a lot of people off and as a result this is very unlikely to take off. The local exchange has been earmarked for upgrade to fibre by 2014 but whether our cabinets get upgraded is not known at this stage. We are quite far from the exchange so I am guessing not.

 

[cambsno]

My understanding is that its as Neil explained. Seems perfect for me, as we are in a village, 2 -3 miles from nearest exchange. Fastest we can get is 1.5mb (more like 1 to 1.2) and I cant see us getting anywhere near 10 anytime soon, let alone 20 or 30.