Well after about 4 months of wresting, tangling, and overall putting up with this Internet has come to a head because I need to get this fixed before RB6 Vegas 2 comes out.
Well here's the deal, I'm hooked up to this Motorola canopy system. I'm suppose to be getting 512kbps download and they never specified the upload though they said it would be "comparable" to the download speed. And getting charged $50 a month for it on top of that. When my net is functioning at its best the upload is around 130kbps, and that is after I called them up and had them bump up my connection speed twice.
Anyway that's enough of my little spiel and now onto the nitty gritty. Because odds are none of you who are reading this has any first hand experience or knowledge of this canopy system I'll explain it a bit.
The Canopy system is essentially a WLAN network using 900mhz radio technology. There is a main receiver antenna which receives signals from the sender antennas, one of which is on my roof. From there the receiver antenna is hooked into a server and then into the Internet, the ISP that the company I'm getting my Internet into is hooked into East-link. Now the receiver antenna works as a router for the smaller sender antennas and the sender antennas work as a router for the houses they are hooked into. Essentially before I get the Internet signal it has to pass through 3 routers including my own; and I don't have any control over my sender antenna nor the receiver as they are both password locked, and even if I did obtain the password for either I'd be in hot water as technically they're only loaning me the antenna on my roof so long as I get my Internet from them (Even after I fronted a $450 installation fee that it turned out I was easily capable of doing myself besides entering a password and clicking a button to enable it).
Now here's what my signal is doing. The most common crap I get is massive jitter, and I am by no means exaggerating, it will jump back and fourth from .5kbps to anywhere from 40 to 120kbs. The signal only peaks for about 4-5 seconds tops while its like this then its back to .5kbps for about 10-30 seconds.
Less often but more common than getting full function is that the net will completely lock up. No traffic in or out, no web pages will load msn wont sign in nothing will ping outside of my home network. When this happens it usually lasts for a few hours succeeded by the jitter, which Ive already mentioned, when something finally gets through.
And the rarest of which, when the net is working at its max potential. The speed usually stays around 120kbps with about 20kbs of jitter up or down. This I can usually play in on cod4 with 2 bars of connection on the menu in-game. Though what it often likes to do when its running at its full proper capacity is bottom out randomly for no apparent reason and then go back up to full strength. Of course during this period I lag until I loose connection to the PSN and get kicked out of the match at hand.
After researching this on the net for some time I've found out that alot of other people are having this exact same problem and no one seems to have an answer and no one is specialized in using this system enough to figure it out. I've heard from a few places that the long bottoming out of the net only happening when one hooks up their own router to the antenna before their computer. I've been trying to hook the antenna up to the PC and then try to get the router to use the Internet off of the PC for a few days now with no result. Though I know this wont fix it for the most part it is a start.
There are two things that I've also learned that makes me question the people I'm getting the Canopy from.
1.) They had told me that it needs to be in line of sight of the tower (which they didn't do when they installed it) to function fully. BUT when I researched it on the Internet it said that my system doesnt need to be in line of sight to function properly. Their theory that it needs to be in line of sight makes sense when I compare what signal I'm getting and what data I've collected.
2.) After using a few networking tools I've discovered that there are 165 different houses hooked up to this one connection. Now, this is out in the sticks and the receiver is on top of this mountain in the middle of nowhere essentially and they've got 165 people sharing one Internet connection, somehow I don't think they've got the capabilities to support that many being that far from well, anything.
My theory on this all is that the antenna itself isn't up far enough to clear the tree line, combined with interference with the signal caused by my router (which shouldn't happen if they had designed their system better imo). Because at best I'm getting slightly above the proper DL speed that I'm suppose to be getting but the upload is still no way up to far, which leads me to believe that their tower has the power to penetrate the trees to get me my DL speed but my antenna doesnt, hence the crappy upload speeds. Though I've got nothing else but that to back my theory up, so I'm at a stand still because I don't know what kind of jitter that I'm suppose to be getting, or upload for that matter, because as I've already said almost no one out there has any experience with this system.
I'll have graphs of my Internet signals running under full capacity for all 3 scenarios that I've said above later on, as well as a topographical signal map of the system with my location and the receiver antenna's location up asap.
Any help would be much appreciated as I cant figure out anymore on my own.
