Some updates incoming, it's been long enough
You may, or may not have picked up on the broadband problems we were suffering whilst we first moved in. Essentially, we had a REIN issue that was knocking the ADSL out randomly throughout the evening and weekend etc. It's down to a faulty electrical supply nearby, but we never got around to pinpointing it and BT... well, *facepalm*
So... I thought I would be stuck until my parents had a rural broadband service fitted. It is a form of point to point wireless access point that receives signals from nearby fibre-fed towers, in the local village.
Interested, I asked the engineers on the job, if I could receive the signal at my home (approx 5km away). They said they'd do a site survey and left. Looking at the graph you can see the distance, the trees and elevation of the "line of sight".
A few months later and this is on my house..
The first day they installed this, they chose to screw it directly to the PVC fascia of the house which I was a bif confused by as there are high trees in the neighbours garden opposite to our house, and I didn't think it would work. It did work, but at "10Mb".
Considering we paid £500 for the privilege of the install, I demanded they come back and put it on a longer pole. They took some convincing, but I always find the mention of "not happy, not paying.." always swings the argument. It's now on a 10ft pole.
If you look at the bottom of the antenna you can see lights. Each light indicates a level of signal strength except the first 2 on the left. 1 is power, 2 is LAN and the others are signal. Red is low, amber is medium and green is full signal for their respective band.
Much better! The ping is surprisingly good too considering the distance it's coming from. It can drop as low as 3-5ms in the winter when the trees have no leaves but aside from whipping out the chainsaw, this is always going to be my limit.
The end goal is fibre to the home, or at the very least fibre to the cabinet, so if I have to remove the WAN antenna I will use the pole they've put up to house the DAB radio aerial. Obviously I will shorten the pole first!
EDIT: Had FTTC installed a few weeks ago on 01/03/2013, so we're not using the wireless service anymore!
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