Comment from the IT nerds if you please.......
Living in the boondocks on the edge of Coromandel Harbour, our broadband was previously delivered by copper line with the dizzying speed of around 3.3 Mpbs download and <1 Mbps upload. A few months ago, Spark gave us the option of going wireless broadband from a new cell tower just across the harbour.
The difference was night and day and we were consistently getting download speeds between 40 and 60 Mpbs. Uploads were north of 15 Mpbs on a pretty consistent basis. When Spark rang to offer the service, they guaranteed 20 Mbps or better. However, during the last week on occasions, some web pages (including Kiwi Biker) have been slow to load and have sometimes timed out. Uploads and downloads for photos and other data have also been painfully slow on occasions. Whilst I’m still happy overall with the wireless service, I wanted to get some evidence if I need to talk to Spark about it.
I set up an automated speed test (
http://testmy.net/) which runs hourly sampling using different size data packets. Referring to the attached graph, although the average download speed was 37 Mpbs, it was skewed by some occasional big download speeds in the middle of the night. It can also be seen that some of the download speeds during sampling were quite poor. Uploading was universally mediocre.
I don’t intend to go to Spark with all guns blazing but if I do need to talk to them at some point, I’d like to be a bit more informed beforehand. It might be that since the tower came into being, increasing user numbers has slowed performance, or at least made it more erratic. Maintenance may also be an issue. I’m also wondering what the Spark guarantee of 20Mbps actually means in real terms. I’d like to think that it actually means daylight hours and not across the whole 24 hour day. Bugger-all good having high speeds when most people are asleep. Reasonable consistency in speeds would be nice too.
I guess that’ll cover things for now but has anyone got a decent knowledge of how wireless broadband via a cell tower actually works? (in lay terms, not geekspeak please)
Cheers,
Geoff
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