Are you thinking of getting a wireless broadband service from Sun (Sun Broadband Wireless), Globe (Tatoo), or Smart (SmartBro)? These companies advertise “up to 2Mbps” bandwidth or the amount of information you can download per second. The bigger the bandwidth, the faster your download will be. What’s the real score? In essence, you probably won’t experience the advertised bandwidth most of the time. Why? Because they simply can’t.
From your wireless modem to the cell site
Your wireless broadband modem connects to a cell site that is connected to the provider’s central office (CO). The connection between the cell site and the CO can sometimes get congested depending on the number of subscribers that connect to that cell site. That explains why subscribers serviced by a cell site with fewer subscribers might get faster bandwidth than a cell site with a lot of subscribers. Think of the cell site as a “hub” (if you’re familiar with IT terminology) — the more subscriber that connect to it, the less bandwidth each subscriber is going to get.
Bandwidth at the Central Office
Providing “fat” or wider bandwidth to each cell site requires a lot of money, much more bandwidth needed for all subscribers at the CO. Imagine if a provider has 10,000 subscribers accessing the internet with, say, 10% (1,000) of them are power users or utilize 100% of the available bandwidth (2Mbps). The provider would require 2,000Mbps or approximately 2Gbps (2 billion bits per second) bandwidth. Some of these providers have multiple pipes with capacities ranging from 10-50Gbps. 26,000 wireless broadband subscribers using 100% of their 2Mbps capacity can easily consume 50Gbps. Don’t forget these ISPs also have wired subscribers who also consume as much bandwidth, or even more, as their wireless brethren.
In summary — you’ll probably only get 10-15% of the advertised bandwidth on the average so don’t expect too much.
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