Airwave Broadband

Turtle_Tommy

Hello,

Does anyone here have broadband from Airwave? If so, is it any good? How is the speed and ping? Recently, I tried to sign up to Nova broadband but the installation engineer couldn't get a signal due to trees. However, he informed me that I have line of sight to a mast from Airwave. Unfortunately, I can't find many reviews of Airwave on the internet and any I did find have been from a couple of years ago. I feel as though I'd be taking a chance considering there are so many different reviews of FWA providers in Ireland. (You have the likes of Nova broadband who have a great reputation and then the likes of Ripplecom who many claim provide an awful service.)

I've been using 3g from Meteor for over a year now but about 2 months ago the service became almost unusable (variable speed and extremely high ping during peak hours). Previous to this, I always got 2+ mbps and a consistently low ping no matter what time of the day it was.

Thanks in advance.

andrew1403

Hi,

Did you go with Airwave? I am thinking of using there service.

Turtle_Tommy

andrew1403 wrote: »

Hi,

Did you go with Airwave? I am thinking of using there service.

Hi, yes we did go with them in the end on their 6 mbps, 40 euro a month package. For the first few months the service was excellent. The speed never dropped and the ping was always brilliant, even at peak times. However, I did notice that their 6 mbps package was not really 6mbps. I did some tests by downloading files and found that it was only 6mbps for the first 10MB of data downloaded and then dropped off and seemed to be capped at ~3mbps for the remainder of the download. I found this strange until I noticed that the connection was left at 6 mbps for just enough time to fool speedtest.net....

Anyway, a few months after the install, Airwave contacted us to tell us that they were upgrading their network and needed to change our equipment as a result. I thought that was great and let them go ahead with it. However, after the equipment change, our broadband became appalling. The speed regularly dropped below 1 mbps and the ping was all over the place, often going above 500 milliseconds!

After a few complaints they finally realised that there was a problem with our connection about a month later and once again changed the equipment on our house. Although this appeared to fix our connection, the speed and ping is still occasionally awful during peak hours and it's not as good as it was in the beginning.

Unfortunately, I cannot post images or links to any speed or ping tests because, apparently, I am a new user. However, I took a speed test a few mornings ago and the download speed was 5.95 mbps, the upload speed was 0.97 mbps and the ping was 10 ms to the closest server,(of course the 5.95 mbps only lasts for the first 10MB as I explained earlier). Taking one now at a quarter to ten at night, I get down speed: 5.35 mbps, up speed: 0.97 mbps and ping: 10 ms. That is a very good speed for this time as it can drop down to ~ 1 mbps on its bad nights.

The ping to google.ie during the day is always around 15 ms and it very rarely goes above 25 ms. At night, the ping is usually the same but I have seen it rise above 60 or even 100 ms on its bad nights.

On the whole, I'd definitely recommend Airwave before any 3g service as it very rarely actually completely goes down and the usage limits are far better than 3g but the 3mbps can be very limiting at times. Are there any other fixed wireless providers in your area? Nova broadband have a great reputation but unfortunately I was unable to get their service.

andrew1403

Thanks for the great update. I also have been looking at Nova broadband. I have a call with them tomorrow to discuss. Did you choose to have the VOIP option with Airwave, and if so do you get much latency on the telephone calls?

I have an Ericom telephone line, but was going to cancel and just get the VOIP addition.

Turtle_Tommy

andrew1403 wrote: »

Thanks for the great update. I also have been looking at Nova broadband. I have a call with them tomorrow to discuss. Did you choose to have the VOIP option with Airwave, and if so do you get much latency on the telephone calls?

I have an Ericom telephone line, but was going to cancel and just get the VOIP addition.

You're welcome! No I didn't bother with the VOIP add on but I think it usually works very well with fixed wireless broadband because of the very low latency usually involved with this type of service.

doodahump

This is interesting. i have been with Nova Networks for over 5 years now and aside from the odd outage and some minor issues I have found them to be more than excellent and have always been willing to go on the record and say so. Unfortunateluy howvere I had some issues starting around Jan/feb this year with slow ping and bad speeds. After much toing and froing they agreed to send an engineer and change my receiver - this was done and I was repointed to a different base station alos and hey presto all was well again(for a few weeks. However sometime maybe April or earlier I cant remember I noticed that my speeds in the evening were poor and i had a very high Ping rate - up to 500-600!!! Thsi was most evenings and netflix became unwartchable at times. Anyway I have tipped backwards and forwards with Nova but of course they have grown in size now so it wont be Dave who you deal with but rather a support team - to be fair they are good for the most part but once they start suggesting its my airport extreme interfering with their antenna(Ive had it as long as Ive had Nova and no issues before...) then i start getting annoyed. Long story short after speeds down of .74mps and up 0f .23 i mailed them again and they insist they are getting between 12-15 mbps to my anttenna.

I use broadband for work dialin often so i need reliable broadband. Speed is not so much important - if i can get a consistent 5-6 mbops and a reliable service then I may actual nchange however the only other alternatives for me are Satellite (obv not0 Ripplecom (ive seen their reviews - yikes!!!) or airwave....

Would you genuinely recommend? I have a friend who had them before and said they were good but that was many years ago and he has moved abroad now. I have always liked Nova but i really cant do this dance with them anymore and if theres a viable alternative then id like to try it at least.

Turtle_Tommy

doodahump wrote: »

This is interesting. i have been with Nova Networks for over 5 years now and aside from the odd outage and some minor issues I have found them to be more than excellent and have always been willing to go on the record and say so. Unfortunateluy howvere I had some issues starting around Jan/feb this year with slow ping and bad speeds. After much toing and froing they agreed to send an engineer and change my receiver - this was done and I was repointed to a different base station alos and hey presto all was well again(for a few weeks. However sometime maybe April or earlier I cant remember I noticed that my speeds in the evening were poor and i had a very high Ping rate - up to 500-600!!! Thsi was most evenings and netflix became unwartchable at times. Anyway I have tipped backwards and forwards with Nova but of course they have grown in size now so it wont be Dave who you deal with but rather a support team - to be fair they are good for the most part but once they start suggesting its my airport extreme interfering with their antenna(Ive had it as long as Ive had Nova and no issues before...) then i start getting annoyed. Long story short after speeds down of .74mps and up 0f .23 i mailed them again and they insist they are getting between 12-15 mbps to my anttenna.

I use broadband for work dialin often so i need reliable broadband. Speed is not so much important - if i can get a consistent 5-6 mbops and a reliable service then I may actual nchange however the only other alternatives for me are Satellite (obv not0 Ripplecom (ive seen their reviews - yikes!!!) or airwave....

Would you genuinely recommend? I have a friend who had them before and said they were good but that was many years ago and he has moved abroad now. I have always liked Nova but i really cant do this dance with them anymore and if theres a viable alternative then id like to try it at least.

Hi, I'm surprised to hear that you have problems with Nova as I have only read great things about them on the internet. Maybe none of these fixed wireless providers are as great as they're made out to be.

Airwave are still fairly poor for me during the evenings. From about 7 to 11 the download speed can drop to under 1mbps and even 360p videos on Youtube can take a while to load. The ping is also dodgy during this time and online games can lag a lot. During the day the connection is perfect even if it is capped to 3mbps like I said in an earlier post.

I wouldn't recommend switching to Airwave if you get 15mbps during the day with Nova because this is far higher than Airwave's speed during the day and it looks like they both suffer badly from congestion during the evening anyway. Of course, you could get a better speed than me with Airwave as you could be connected to a different mast but you wouldn't know until you get it installed unfortunately. Does Nova ever completely lose connection? Airwave have only gone down once in the last 2 months so this could benefit you if Nova are down a lot.

If you are leaving Nova though, I'd definitely recommend Airwave over 3g mostly due to the usage caps and the low ping during the day. Stay well away from satellite broadband though.
They're all heavily congested and the ping is always over 800ms!

RHOnline

doodahump wrote: »

to be fair they are good for the most part but once they start suggesting its my airport extreme interfering with their antenna(Ive had it as long as Ive had Nova and no issues before...) then i start getting annoyed. Long story short after speeds down of .74mps and up 0f .23 i mailed them again and they insist they are getting between 12-15 mbps to my anttenna.

Just be aware that Nova broadcast at about 5.8Ghz.......so it is POSSIBLE for the 5Ghz band of your Airport Extreme to interfere with their "broadcast".......and they do also vary what they broadcast at, so it's possible for problems to be only seen now

I had similar problems with 5Ghz Access Points interfering with their Receiver and I made them aware of the issue (Dec 2012) as they were unaware of the potential conflicts.

I ended out changing the broadcast band for my 5Ghz Wifi network and changing the location of the Access point

My advice would be as follows

1) Temporarily turn off the 5Ghz band in your Airport Extreme if it's enabled

2) better still, take a laptop or computer to where the Nova RJ45 Terminated Cable is connected to your Airport

Turn off the Airport completely.......and connect the Nova cable Directly into the RJ45 Network port of your PC

Now run a Speedtest (or even better a more prolonger download test) to measure what you achieving when connected Directly to the Nova Receiver

Once these Base points have been ascertained, it'll give you more information about whether the problem lies with the Nova connection......or if something else is interfering with it

Best of luck

mrblack

I was listening to a report recently where a WISP was complaining that the growth in Netflix use by his subscribers was killing the WISP business model due to the huge traffic generated by Netflix.
I wonder if that is part of the reason for the throttling down to 3mps. My provider Digiweb place 100gig limit per 30 days which is very easily reached via a few long HD movies and kids programmes. Sorry for the hijack!
Mrblack

doodahump

Interesting replies. I think the Netflix comment may be relevant here. I know that there has been a meteoric rise in its usage and i guess it could very well be the cause. Im currently testing at 90 ping and between1-2mbps but yesterday it sank to .25mbps!!!! Guess switching to airwave just won't help and this could just be a sign the WISP's are reaching their saturation point. In any case my neighbour and I have noticed that Nova seem to be happy to lose us as customers, we're probably higher users and more outspoken than most users so the hassle of trying to help is proving too much. To be fair they came and changed my access point to pint to another base and that has helped insofar as my peak speeds never hit above 6 mbps but I'm more consistently getting 2-3 now. Watching RTE player earlier and took 15 mins to watch 7 mins ...

WRT the airport extreme i did power off all my routers and test from the POE and speeds were still excruciatingly slow. I suppose if i want decent broadband i will have to move to the city lol.

Big fear is that the Nova or other wisps won't be able to keep pace with the use of netflix etc. I suppose I just have to move or pray for the next big Broadband breakthrough. Thanks for all the tips etc.