My WoW game is really suffering...

June 9, 2006 10:03 AM

Wireless ISP woes: Is this normal for a wireless ISP, or do these people just suck at what they do?

I have an account with a wireless ISP. They have an antenna in town (about 6 miles away) and I have a transceiver with an antenna attached to the side of my house. Inside my house, the connection goes through a Linksys router, with wired connections to both of my computers.

I know that a decent connection is possible through this ISP. Often, especially in the morning, I can get ping times in the 60-80 ms range, with no packet loss. But more often, I get ping times in the 500-1500 ms range, with packet loss of 30-80%.

These people are telling me that it's the best they can do. They've offered to come out and move my antenna up higher, but I don't think that's going to help, because I know (see lower ping times above) that the current physical setup is capable of a decent connection. They've also offered to buy back the antenna and equipment. I would hate to go that route, since they are the only high-speed option I have out here in the sticks, but I'm getting really tired of paying for "high speed" and not getting it.

It seems to me that what's really happening is that they are using a cheap (and crappy) provider for their connection to the backbone, and won't admit it. If I'm going to fire them, I'd at least like the satisfaction of saying that to them when I do it. Am I totally off-base? Are there factors I'm overlooking? What do y'all think?

posted by bricoleur to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Do you know what technology they are using for the wireless connection?

Can you run a traceroute and see where the ping times jump drastically?

(No experience with wireless ISPs, but plenty of wireless experience)
posted by kableh at 10:07 AM on June 9, 2006

When I try traceroute, I get asterisks for everything after the first hop.
posted by bricoleur at 10:15 AM on June 9, 2006

What does your traceroute look like when things are working well?
posted by Good Brain at 10:51 AM on June 9, 2006

Looks the same; I used to be able to do traceroute but since about a month ago, all I get is asterisks. So I guess that means nothing after the router, which makes me suspect their equipment is not accepting my traceroute traffic. Which in turn makes me wonder why not...
posted by bricoleur at 11:42 AM on June 9, 2006

I've just moved from a home with the same setup you describe. I was having some problems with dropped connections and I called them on it. They eventually came out and moved my antenna to a different side of the house - apparently the distant trees were the problem. I didn't have any trouble after that, so moving your antenna may help. There could be a lot of obstructions over six miles. (my provider was using a local telephone company's T1 as a backbone, and when it worked, it worked just fine.)
posted by dual_action at 11:44 AM on June 9, 2006

Ah, memories.

I operated in a similar environment for several years (up until a few months ago). I used an 802.11b flat panel antenna (A YDI Etherant 2, no longer in production, but cost in the $400-$500 range when new). The antenna was about 18db gain, as I recall, and about a 20 degree beam width, aimed an an omni antenna about six miles away. The omni was atop a tower on a hill above the town I lived near, and my house was approximately 600' higher than the tower, and the antenna was additionally about 90 feet up a tree (hence my choice of an antenna with a very wide beam width: the tree sway didn't affect my signal). If I'd had it to do over again, I'd have spent the extra bucks for the flat panel with the integrated amplifier to get some extra margin of stability (I'm a full time telecommuter, so spending some cash on high quality business critical equipment is not an issue for me). My throughput rates were limited by the ISP's connection to the Internet more than the radio link, as I recall it ran around 4Mb/sec down and 2 Mb/sec up.

Anyway, enough about me.

First, the way to check if it's the link from you to them or them to the Internet is to run pings and such against your first hop gateway (which should be the ISP's radio, or perhaps one hop past there). Use full frame pings; the default is usually about a 64 byte ping packet, you want to run around 1400 bytes to fully exercise the channel. Send a hundred or so at a time; look at the round trip times and the loss percentage.

The problem with traceroute crapping out after the first hop could be due to the ISP (or your own firewall) filtering them. If the first hop you see is your own router, look there first. If ping works, then I'd use it first, we only need to deal with the ISP's end right now to isolate the radio link. You should be able to get the ISP's gateway address from the configuration on your router.

If the round trip time or loss percentage to the ISP itself is terrible, then that link is the problem,and it's likely to be the radio. Note that radio signal problems can be something of a black art, so check these things when it's running poorly, not when it's running well. "Intermittent problem" is the name of the game in radio; it could be that you're getting interference from damn near anything between you and the ISP. Frankly, based on my experience, I suspect this is more likely than the ISP just being losers with crappy throughput to the Internet (but you never know; they could be massively oversubscribed).

Anyway, if your ping times and throughput to the ISP itself are stunning, then your problem is as you suspect, and you can quit reading.

Now, assuming it's the radio link...

If you're running an omni antenna (which will look like a straight vertical stick), or something very low gain, you may have a marginal signal to noise ratio, which can cause intermittent poor transmissions. Note that there are two S/N ratios here: your reception of the ISP's signal, and the ISP's reception of your signal. The latter is usually more of an issue, since the ISP's equipment is likely to be much higher gain. Both of you should be able to check your respective S/N and see if one or the other is marginal (for my antenna, the control software reported both the reception signal and noise, and if the access point was compatible, would query it for its reception signal and noise of my transmissions to it). If you can, do this when it's good, and again when it's bad and compare them.

If you've got a directional antenna, it may need to be peaked to be properly lined up. I'm guessing that you don't, since the ISP talked about moving the antenna higher (not adjusting the point). If you do, though, it might just need re-pointing.

Another eater of signal is the wire from the antenna to the radio. The equipment I used was an integrated dingus with the antenna and radio (and an ethernet transceiver) all packaged together, so the cable loss basically zero. If you've got lots of cable between your radio and antenna, this can also cause signal loss (depending on the quality of the cable, anywhere from 3dB per 4 feet to perhaps 3dB per 40 feet for the good stuff). If there's a cut or scrape on the jacket of this wire (breaking the shielding), then you can also get intermittent problems when, e.g., the wire gets wet or you run the microwave or whatever.

FWIW, my equipment typically ran at signal of about -65 dB, and a noise floor of about -85, so my S/N ratio was generally around 20. If the S/N ratio fell below 10, the data rate would begin to step down and problems would begin to crop up. In a poor S/N ratio environment, one effect is that ping times can increase dramatically as the 802.11 protocol repeatedly retransmits frames. If you lock your equipment at a lower data rate, your noise floor should go down (to around -94 or so as I recall at 1Mb/sec) and the S/N ratio should go up. The throughput might also go down, too, but it's unlikely your ISP is providing you 11Mb/sec to the Internet, so step it down to 5, 2 or 1 if you have to.

Another exciting topic you may want to read up on (if you haven't already) is Fresnel Zone clearance. If you're lazy on math, try the handy calculator. The short version is that for an 802.11b (2.4 GHz) at six miles, you'll need a variably sized clear tube for line of sight, ranging in diameter from 8 feet at .1 miles from the antennas to 34 feet at the midpoint. If you don't have this line of sight clearance, you'll get various exciting and random signal problems which could induce the behavior you're seeing (intermittent reflections causing irregular degredation of the signal).

Next, if the ISP's radio does not automatically adjust its radio distance parameters, it may be necessary to tweak them. I understand that newer equipment handles this automatically, adjusting itself based upon the round trip times from the furthest station. My ISP's original equipment did not, and so I went through several iterations of adjusting their radio parameters. The problem here is that the large distance has significantly more speed of light delay in the signal than 802.11 was originally intended for, so some radios may time out or lose lock or the like if they're not properly adjusted. Your equipment may have just a couple of choices, like "short," "medium" and "long," with each longer distance allowing fewer speed choices.

Once I got all of my stuff properly adjusted, I pretty much never had to mess with it, and left the gear there when I moved out.
posted by doorsnake at 11:47 AM on June 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

I would think the more likely culprit is too many wireless users. 802.11 was not designed to be a wide area system, and even in our office, heavy use of the access point results in noticable degradation in access speed. This theory is further supported by the traceroute results.
If this is the problem, there's really not a lot that can be done other than put up additional access points (which will only help to some extent).

For an 802.11b network, a rule of thumb is to allow for 500 Kbps each way, which delivers a user experience similar to a DSL connection.

802.11b/g can vary in available throughput, typical speeds seen will be from 6-22 Mbps (pdf) and most likely at the low end if there are any 802.11b users on the network.

Using the rule of thumb above, you have a network that can provide 12-44 users per access point a DSL-like experience. I'm betting it's closer to 12 because its quite likely several users have 802.11b, and that due to their distance they affect the capacity even further.

The best thing under your control that you can do is to make the signal as good as possible, as that will ensure you get the best you can out of the system.

Other ideas would be to convince the ISP to buy additional access points and use directional antennas to subdivide the town into areas. That will help some as well, just adding access points blithely, it will help a little but isn't the best approach.
posted by forforf at 12:42 PM on June 9, 2006

Does the poor service correlate with weather or is it time based?

That is, do you get good pings in the morning regardless of weather (rainy/windy/cloudy)?

How about time? Do the good ping times stop after a certain time? Say 9am?

The first thing I'd do is run something like this and try and pinpoint a pattern of some sort. Say, ping your isp every 30 secs for a day, and see if there is a time pattern.

I'd also get them to come out and move the antenna.
If you are on the weak end of a signal, then anything at all can cause it to go bad(cloudy day, a tree waving back and forth, a flock of birds). If you reorient the antenna(with a strength meter, not just by some guy coming out and eyeballing it), you've got a decent chance of getting a good signal.
Think of it this way, it probably won't make it any worse, so you've got nothing to lose.
posted by madajb at 7:44 PM on June 9, 2006

Thanks so much for the help!

I will let them come out and move the antenna. I checked at one point yesterday, and pinging their gateway seemed to indicate that the problem was, in fact, between me and the gateway. Even though I can get a perfectly acceptable signal at times, I now understand that at other times the poor signal may be due to environmental interference, so it would be worth a try.

Generally, the bad connections are in the evening. I notice it particularly at about the time most people would be coming home from work and booting their PCs. I can live with that, up to a point. But I get very frustrated when it happens during the day. Armed with the new knowledge I've acquired here, I hope I can make improvements—or get my ISP to make them—that will reduce that frustration. Thanks again!
posted by bricoleur at 8:37 AM on June 10, 2006

The lack of functioning traceroute is probably them blocking ICMP. [rant and rave about retarded security measures deleted] You can try pinging 198.6.1.4 (or .5 or .6...) and see if you can get an answer there. It's a WCOM/UUNET nameserver that I have never had a problem getting an answer from... unless ICMP packets were firewalled.
posted by phearlez at 9:00 PM on June 10, 2006