I used USI Wireless at my old house and was very happy with it. I had one of their "modems" with an external antenna, and always had strong signal strength. I had clear line of site to a node, however, and placed my antenna in a window so there was nothing obstructing the signal. One thing they mentioned at some point was that laptops typically are not transmitting as strong a signal as their stations, and this can lead to problems. Your laptop can receive their signal just fine, but sending packets is a different story, and your signal strength indicator doesn't show this. -Erik On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > I have CenturyLink service, again. It was down for awhile and it was not > easy to get service when I had to deal with their call center in the > Philippines. They seemed like really nice people and they spoke great > English, but when they ordered a service for me, it never happened. They'd > give me a tracking number, but the system would still have no record of my > order and no record of the tracking number! > > Anyway, while I had no CenturyLink, I used the USI Wireless internet system. > They charge $10 for one day, which is ridiculous, but they charge $18 for a > week and $25 for a month, or $20 for monthly recurring. > > I had huge problems with lots of disconnects and dropped packets, but I was > grateful that I could get something while my CenturyLink was down. When I > first signed up, I chose this WiFi connection... > > City of Minneapolis Public WiFi > > ...opened the web browser, got a username/password for login and ordered a > week of service. After a few days, I realized that I had other options like > these: > > usiw_secure > usiw_secure_S06N139T1 > USI Wireless > usiw_secure_S01N129T1 > > I used usiw_secure with the username/password established above, and that > made things work a *lot* better. I had been getting highly variable ping > times to my office machine, lots of dropped packets, lots of stalling of VNC > connection, but now I was getting 30 ms pings, good consistency, no dropped > packets, smooth operation of VNC -- everything better. Now it could be some > confounder like the time of day, but I'm pretty convinced that the > usiw_secure just worked tons better. A speed test showed 1 Mbps both up and > down. > > Another thing -- I tried to figure out where in my home I had the best > reception. So I started pinging my office machine, once per second (the USI > WiFi router didn't respond to ping) and I walked around the house looking > for patterns. It seemed best toward the southwest of my house. Is there a > better way to test signal strength? Is there a better way to improve > reception? > > Anyway, thought I'd put that out there in case it helps anyone, but I also > wanted to hear if anyone has any ideas on how to deal better with some of > these issues. Thanks. > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -- Erik K. Mitchell erik.mitchell at gmail.com