what's ripwave like

corkstudent

i was wondering if ripwave is any good these days. i'm using college wireless right now but it would be nice to have unrestricted access even if it's kind of slow.

what kind of speeds can i expect? 512/8 = 64 k/sec so is that the maximum i'll get?

any help would be appreciated, but make it quick as i'll be getting it today around 5 or so.

corkstudent

are there any other options besides this and clearwire for broadband in a box? or anything that could plug into my laptop...

RangeR

This has been talked to death here for a long time. A quick search on these forums for ripwave and clearwire [clear****e, clears***e, clearlys***e wire etc] will give you all the information you need.

The speeds advertised by the respective companies are the theoretical speeds possible with their technologies. You will NEVER reach these speeds.

Please have a little look at the search results. If there are still questions you have that are unanswered, please feel free to post them here.

corkstudent

okay.

i had ripwave once before and it wasn't like dialup at all, but i went out of range. just wondering if they've improved it.

flybynight

corkstudent wrote: »

okay.

i had ripwave once before and it wasn't like dialup at all, but i went out of range. just wondering if they've improved it.

It hard to say which is better cos it depends where you are. However based on my experience on using both before I finally got fixed line broadband I'd definitely say Ripwave is better than Clearwire.

I had Clearwire 2MB for a year and it was a disaster from start to finish. I then had Ripwave for 2 months while waiting for fixed-line and I was actually pleasantly surprised - I got faster download speeds with the 512k package than I ever did with Clearwire 2MB!! Clearwire was constantly dropping out but Ripwave was surprisingly stable. However I'm In Dublin, could be the opposite is true for you.

Ripwave is also considerably cheaper of course.

corkstudent

how much better is ripwave+, really? is it really twice as fast? if so, wouldn't it be much more worth getting?

also, people annoy me when they say "dialup speed" for anything less than 60 k/sec. dialup can never reach those pseeds. the fastest dual channel isdn can reach is just over 20k(normally less for me). ripwave was several times faster to download than isdn for me.

RangeR

corkstudent wrote: »

how much better is ripwave+, really? is it really twice as fast? if so, wouldn't it be much more worth getting?

also, people annoy me when they say "dialup speed" for anything less than 60 k/sec. dialup can never reach those pseeds. the fastest dual channel isdn can reach is just over 20k(normally less for me). ripwave was several times faster to download than isdn for me.

I can't speak for others but in my experience in using Clearwire, although the actual speeds I was getting were much better than dialup [in theory], it FELT like dial up when you take into account packet drops and latency. It actually "FELT" much slower than dial-up. Speed isn't everything. You could have a 10Mb connection but if the latency is 500ms, it isn't worth a ****e.

I feel I have to say, to be balanced, I started with clearwire when they were in their testing phase. It was rock solid. I got full advertised speeds, if not more, with very low latency and 0 packet loss until a few months after they went live.

I couldn't fault it at all and was better than many wired DSL packages that I've used. However and I'm not 100% sure on the reason, but it was either

1. their inability to configure their system properly [doubtful]
2. their willingness to over subscribe their network [doubtful at the time]
3. the configuration of the network that was forced on them by their American owners was detrimental to even a half decent service [extremely likely].

corkstudent

IrishTLR wrote: »

I can't speak for others but in my experience in using Clearwire, although the actual speeds I was getting were much better than dialup [in theory], it FELT like dial up when you take into account packet drops and latency. It actually "FELT" much slower than dial-up. Speed isn't everything. You could have a 10Mb connection but if the latency is 500ms, it isn't worth a ****e.

i know what you mean. i tried 3 broadband a while back and it was like that. ripwave wasn't, though.

I feel I have to say, to be balanced, I started with clearwire when they were in their testing phase. It was rock solid. I got full advertised speeds, if not more, with very low latency and 0 packet loss until a few months after they went live.

I couldn't fault it at all and was better than many wired DSL packages that I've used. However and I'm not 100% sure on the reason, but it was either

1. their inability to configure their system properly [doubtful]
2. their willingness to over subscribe their network [doubtful at the time]
3. the configuration of the network that was forced on them by their American owners was detrimental to even a half decent service [extremely likely].

yeah, i'd say 3's problem is the same, configuration issues.

has anyone tried ripwave plus though? is it worth getting over the normal package?

watty

corkstudent wrote: »

how much better is ripwave+, really? is it really twice as fast? if so, wouldn't it be much more worth getting?

also, people annoy me when they say "dialup speed" for anything less than 60 k/sec. dialup can never reach those pseeds. the fastest dual channel isdn can reach is just over 20k(normally less for me). ripwave was several times faster to download than isdn for me.

Don't leave out your b = bits, B= bytes, 8 bits in a Byte, but serial transmisson / modems have overheads so your download/upload file speed in Bytes is closer to 1/10th of quoted line speed.

Dailup is up to 56kb/s ~ 5.6kB/s, but has errors that can reduce the apparent speed on TCP data by up to 50%, UDP is not reduced.
ISDN is error free and reasonable latency, so 1 ch, 64kb/s with link compression can achieve nearly 90kb/s or nearly 10kB/s download, twice for 2 channel.

GSM is 14.4k or 28.8k (fixed speed).
GPRS, 3G, HSDPA are all variable speed. Due to errors, & latency the 50k+ GPRS will always seem worse than good dailup. 3G @ up to 384kbps (Or HSDPA up to 3600kbps) will mostly be inferior to dual channel ISDN (As the ISDN is fixed speed and often 1/10th or less latency).

Even Dual Channel ISDN which @ 128kb/s can achieve 200kb/s with compression (often no contention), is "Narrowband" so it baffles me why 3G /HSDPA is called "Broadband" since the speed is shared by up to 24 users and is nothing like the experience of entry level DSL in experience.

eircom should offer true flat rate dual channel ISDN (24/7) for 30% less than mobile (esp if you can't get DSL, then at DSL price) and analog dialup at 1/2 the price 24/7 no limits. It costs eircom a fraction of 3G cost.

Ripwave is now promoted by Navini as "pre Wimax" (But a fish is Pre-Mammal). Originally it was marketed as a Wireless ISDN replacement. Ripwave really does typically go at less than analog dialup (50Kbps) to ISDN speeds (220kbps).

JohnMcMahon

Avoid Clearwire like the plague - they charge a small fortune for a weak to average service. They're quite sly about giving you full internet access during the trial period and then closing off ports (so no torrenting) and ****ing with things like VPN when your trial's expired. Technical support is a joke too - they once tried to convince me that a temporary performance drop at 7-8 one evening was down to the heavy volume of traffic (as in, cars and buses!) in town!

Ripwave, well it's not great but it has several advantages over Clearwire - 1) more stable 2) much cheaper 3) no port blocking 4) no limits on upload/download.

You might also want to try some of the mobile (3/Vodafone/O2) internet options, most of im will give you a few weeks trial.

corkstudent

What about Ripwave + though? Does it go twice as fast?

watty

It might or might not. Depends how many users are in your mast sector. You could be paying more for the same speed.

corkstudent

watty wrote: »

It might or might not. Depends how many users are in your mast sector. You could be paying more for the same speed.

I'll give it a try for a month or two. see what happens. if it's still slow i'll switch to normal.

watty

Make sure there is no minimum 6mth+ contract then on it.