NBNCO

[LP]

Are you familiar with Curlewis Winery Jim?  Well, that’s not us but we’re very close 

NBN has just advised that Fixed Wireless access is now available in our area.  The brochure provided is non-committal on internet speeds and does point out that we may have to look at alternatives if we can’t receive a good quality signal.  Why am I not surprised?

In general, unless you are very close to the exchange tor transmission tower, there won't be much difference between fixed wireless and ADSL2/2+ performance. Typical 4G broadband pegs at about 10Mbs/1Mbs for the average user, which is about the same as ADSL2/2+ at an average distance from the exchange.

NBN Fixed Wireless is based on LTE / 4G and can exceed 20Mbs but is still sensitive to distance and weather. If you are close enough to the transmission tower you could get 50Mbs/5Mbs, but most likely you should get about 20Mbs/5Mbs, both these figures are likely to exceed ADSL2/2+.

The advantage of wireless is that it's not affected by the condition of the copper, the disadvantage is that it's affected by obstacles like buildings,  large trees, tin roofs and weather, in particular large line of sight trees when it's windy and wet, because the wet shimmering leaves cause reflections that create multiple pathways between the antennas, called jitter. To overcome that jitter the rate of data transmission has to be reduced so bandwidth fails dramatically.

If you are interested in learning more take a look at this thread on Whirlpool, some of it is obsolete but it's a good general outline.

http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/highlights_...n___thread