The MacAlba

It’s now been a month since moving from 2-way satellite “broadband” service to a wireless broadband network connection.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference - the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).