[lug] Local phone service with Comcast--any experience?

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 05:49:06PM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:

> Oh yeah... someone else mentioned the WRT54G... maybe that plus a 
> standard Vonage box would be more flexible.  I saw some posts around 
> that said Linksys is messing with the hardware and there are now (once 
> again) multiple versions of the device... all named WRT54G.  Why *do* 
> they do that?!  Sigh...

Something to think about: I have line of sight with 12 to 18 dB directional
antennas, and I still get 20-30 seconds dropout per hour due to all the
interference on the 2.4 Ghz band.  My normal signal is good enough to get 10
Mbps sustained, which is a really good signal, but I get noise as high as
-60dB, and because of the way 802.11b works, it won't even transmit when the
noise is that high[1].  I was considering setting up voip over my wireless link,
and I probably will still try, but I don't expect it to be very reliable.

And no, no one else is using my channel or even the two adjacent channels, at
least not with 802.11b gear.  I suspect cordless phones, but I know there are
at least two sources, because they affect the gear differently: one of them
causes the signal strength reported by iwconfig to drop to -110db or so, and
the other one causes the noise to rise to -60dB or so.

[1] At least, I think that's how it works... radioheads correct me if that's
not how the carrier sense part of 802.11b works.