Ahhh, wireless broadband, yet another technology with a lot of promises.
Wireless has some potential, but (seems there always is a but) it has the same types of problems as DSL or cable does.
Wireless works sort of like cell phones do and are full of the same types of problems digital cell phone technology.
The antenna(s) for this technology operate at one given frequency. This frequency is split up to form each wireless connection. The granularity of the split is adjustable, but it is not infinite.
As the bandwidth of the signal is used, the connection speed potential gets reduced. In order to keep this speed up, another antenna must be used in the cell network.
Like DSL and cable modems, the more users that join the network, the slower the throughputs get. No where, in any marketing or advertising will you see the term "fixed rate" as it applies to the connection speeds. The speeds are advertised maximum rates, and not fixed rates.
The other problem with wireless broadband, and it is a geographical problem, is the D/FW area is very "dirty". That is to say, the amount of air signals are very high, which causes problems for a lot of the wireless communication technology companies.
Now about DSL. I know you are in the GTE area, which is not a bad place to be. GTE has done a really good job with thier DSL service (telco service).
Between the DSL, cable modem, and wireless technologies, I would go with DSL every time. Performance reasons aside, DSL is wire based and not susceptible to the inherent problems of wireless. A piece of aluminum foil drifting in front of an antenna and BOOM, you are offline.
DSL also has redundency in the infrastructure of the telco. Cable modem does not.
As much as we like to bash telcos, the response time for fixing problems is much better than the cable company, and the wireless companies.
Just from the point of reliability, DSL wins hands down over all competing technologies.
DSL also allows you to chose the ISP you want to use. None of the others allow that.
The cost is higher for DSL, but I like the lack of frustration. I will pay more to get rid of that.
We have been offering DSL service since 3/99 and 6 months into it, we dropped our DSL service prices across the board. We have had only 2 support calls from all our DSL clients, and one was due to a temporary outage, which GTE was good enough to put on thier support answer line, and the other was a bad ethernet card.
This may not be true in all parts of the country, but it is true here.
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
