Anon | reply to Anon
Re: Sprint Not So Highspeed Broadband Here is what I hope will be a balanced review of Sprint Broadband (used to be called SpeedChoice).
Why did I choose SpeedChoice? It's the only high speed option (DSL and cable are not yet available). I live on the fringe of town (Mesa east of Gilbert), so other high speed options will be slow in coming.
It took less than a month between the time I ordered the service and the time they came out to install it. I chose the 2-year contract which costs $100. (The 1-year contract is $200 and the month-to-month is $300.) Please read the contract terms here. They advertised speeds of 5Mbps downstream (1Mbps typical) and 256kbps upstream.
To install the system, they erected the diamond-shaped antenna on my roof, pointed to South Mountain in Phoenix. (If you live in Phoenix but don't have line-of-sight to South Mountain, you don't qualify.) They ran a ground wire from the antenna to an 8 or 10-foot rod they pounded into the ground on the side of the house. They also ran a coax line into the room where the modem was to be. (Not very sightly, but then it's hard to crawl around up in my particular attic.) I just wish they had used a white coax wire to match the wall.
How does it work? Well, there are good and bad points. First the good. In practical terms, I can get nearly 2Mbps downstream from Microsoft at around 3-4am. The test at DSLReports.com reported up to 1.3Mbps at 6pm yesterday. I usually have no problems with their mail server. And connections usually won't drop for more than 30 seconds at a time. (They'll pick right back up automatically.)
Now for the bad. Transfer rates are VERY inconsistent. Each test on DSLReports.com yesterday actually yielded several results, ranging from 300kbps downstream to 1.3Mbps downstream. Every test was done pretty much right after the other. It's unpredictable. And upstream speed is horrible! Normally I get around 10-20kbps upstream (DSLReports.com says I get 30-100kbps). To compare, standard modem will give from 20-30 kbps upstream.
Ping times are pretty bad. They start at 200ms and go up from there. Many packets (roughly 10%) are lost! As for online gaming (Half-Life/Team Fortress), during peak periods I'll lose the connection for ~30 seconds every 5-10 minutes (which means certain death). Between connection losses, the game works pretty well - at least better than a standard modem. I could adjust the TCP packet size (which is what their registry tweaks do) to help decrease ping times, but that's not the issue - the issue is really the dropped connections.
On the same subject, often (again, roughly 10% of the time) I'll try to get to a web page, but it says the web page is unavailable. So I immediately hit reload, and it comes up fine. So I don't think it's only ping packets that are getting lost - either the DNS server keeps going down, or I'm also losing legitimate packets destined to be html web pages!
All in all, it's better than a standard modem (the only alternative), but I wish I wasn't locked into that contract, and I wish I could get QWest's new 1Mbit synchronous DSL option which consistently achieves 800kbps up and down (ahh, heaven!). |
