Hello, a few months ago I couldn't take using the crappy Centurylink DSL we have out where I live, and after continually asking them, i only got a response that they had absolutely no plans to upgrade the equipment in my area (160+ dsl users on a DSLAM served by 8 T1 copper circuits, or roughly 12mb/s of total bandwidth). So I decided to call up another one of the WISP's that serve my area, of which there are three:
Cougar Wireless, Priority Terabit (advertised as Ptera), and Air-Pipe.
Air-Pipe's service speeds and pricing would have been worse than what i was getting on centurylink so I made no point in asking them.
I had previously had Ptera come out and do a site survey and they found no signal (though they might have if they had checked from the roof, but noone was home when they did the survey).
So I called Cougar Wireless, and after alot of trial and error, they were able to pick up a signal on their 5GHz Ubiquiti Rocket M5 dish, from one specific spot on our roof (the only view of any of the 3 provider's APs is very limited by geography and trees).
So after a hefty install fee, i am now paying $85/mo for 6/2 service, with a 20MB "boost", meaning the service operates at the maximum attainable speed for the first 20MB of any connection (though i have seen it go 40MB before dropping to 6mb/s)
Anyways, Cougar wireless advertises their main rural services as "Cougar Fiber Unleased" or CFI for short and there are no data caps. So far i have been mostly happy with the service as compared to what i was using, since i can now use the internet and most things alot better than i could before, with two exceptions.
The first, i noticed, was Gaming.
While my base pings are far lower (the old qwest hardware used DSL packet interleave so my pings were already fairly high), i notice the ping times are VERY jittery. if i run a ping to google, for example, 100 times in cmd, i might get a low ping of 10-20ms, but its varies widely and generally jumps between 40-80ms and i end up with an average of 50ms. sometimes it will even jump up several 100s of ms.
Reported Pings in game seem to be a bit more steady, apart from the occasional spike, but I notice now that the games themselves seem to be far more jittery than before, almost as if the packet flow is not only being aggregated at different times, but as if some of the packets aren't even arriving in the correct order. I notice this most heavily in games like BF3/4, while moving it seems to jump around quite a bit.
The second issue i see happen, mostly during peak usage hours is a lack of available bandwidth. Ill see my downloads drop and stay around 3 or 4mb/s for quite a while during peak usage hours, and im fairly certain this is partly due to who Cougar wireless uses for their backhaul and data transport.
A trace route command reveals that Cougar Wireless uses a
Comcast Business fiber connection.
This irks me because of several things:
1. the only two residential land line broadband companies operating in my town are Comcast and Centurylink
2. There are other back haul providers who could be better suited to Cougar Wireless' and their customer's needs, such as TW Telecom and Level 3
3. Comcast isn't a Tier 1 network, and their network for my area is especially bad because it is bottle-necked by only having connections to other networks in two places, Portland OR and Seattle WA. The way Comcast routes their traffic also affects the quality of the connection in some ways.
TL;DR, my WISP uses Comcast for Backhaul/Data transport and I find it reduces the quality of the service. I have seen data that would seem to prove Comcast's network is to blame for some of these problems, and I think my WISP could serve it's customers needs much better if it can find another transport provider, so I'm wondering:
1. are ping issues like this generally the norm for this type of broadband connection?
2. How common is this type of data transport situation among other WISPs in the US
3. How can I approach my WISP about finding a solution that benefits both them as a business and their customers?
Thanks for reading and any help you might have
-Nemesis158