Rundown of Woosh anyone?

Hey

I was wondering if anyone could give me a complete rundown of Woosh... I have rung them 3 times and every time got different answers to what the cap is, how much the modems cost etc. The webpage also isnt very helpful.

If anyone is sure about Woosh, please let me know, preferable from someone who is on it themselves.

I have done a lot of testing on the system.
Modem is $499 (USB Cable supplied)
If you want to use ethernet, add $30 for the adaptor (requires PPPOE)

For their home service, can't remember the monthly fee, something around $50. At present, they plan to set the cap at 10 times the median usage - vague but probably a fair way to do it.

Data speed:
I was getting about 238k out of it in the CBD - listed at 250k so not bad
Ping times/latency:
Terrible, expect 100-120msec pings to Auckland based servers - dial up in comparison is about 60msec and my adsl is about 30msec

Hope this helps
-John

Yup this does help alot, but when you say 10 times the median are you talking about 25 gig/month?

Internet gaming isnt that big a deal, i mainly download, so that bring my next question, is national usage counted?

"The Woosh Everyday plan is subject to reasonable usage, determined at our discretion, and is designed for the usage of most residential users. Our current policy is to review the usage of customers who use around 10 times the median usage (current median 700MB p/month). If customers are consistently exceeding such an amount we will contact them to discuss their usage patterns. "

so 7gig :|... thats prolly national and international too :|

worse than telecoms "oh so elite" 256k dsl plan (if it is national and internation capped)

So is this really broadband? :?

hi all,
from memory, the international broadband standard is 384Kbit/s
so... no - But if you get a business connection (350-500Kbit/s) It can be
But then, neither are any of the jetstart(128k) or new jetstream home plans(256kb) :P The can't actually advertise it as broadband, and they're very careful not to.

If you want a cheap woosh modem, tell them you requested info, and received a ref:white letter ($199 for modem) I think this offer expires, like, tomorrow? But i'm sure if you talk quickly they'll let you have it.

btw. I contacted and asked about the high ping, they said they're likely to have it fixed by the end of nov.

If only it was available in my area

My opinion Woosh is not broadband, the latency is built into the technology much like the latency in GPRS and CDMA.

If they are going to place a bandwidth measurement on what is broadband they should also place a maximum latency size on it as well. This would ensure NZ does actually catch up with the rest of the world rather than seatlling for second best.

Personally I would take jetstart over woosh any day, ssh is bad enough on dialup let alone something that is even slower!

Woosh told me that the technology they are using removes/grossly reduces that ping problem, the only reason they're getting it is a buggy interconnect with the 'cell sites'

Who knows :P

Based on what I saw today, woosh have a long way to go to get a half decent service.

Results for "ping -n 10 nzwireless.org" from a Woosh Connection

Pinging nzwireless.org [210.48.99.14] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=97ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=177ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=294ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=170ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=1506ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=340ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=372ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=128ms TTL=248
Reply from 210.48.99.14: bytes=32 time=243ms TTL=248
Ping statistics for 210.48.99.14:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 95ms, Maximum = 1506ms, Average = 342ms

Note the following variable details of this test.
(Your results may vary)
Done at 12:55pm on 30 October '03 from a Woosh connection in Auckland CBD
IPWireless modem shows signal strength as 4 out of 4 leds.
IPWireless control software shows signal strength at 39% (Go figure)
Using Base station 96
RSCP -65dBm (Woosh helpdesk say this is signal strength)
ISCP -74dBm (Woosh helpdesk say this is the noise)

Woosh should be taken to court with misleading consumers to think that they were selling a broadband product.

One wonders how they were thinking to do VOIP on that as well as data ?

My $200 one arrived today, Will see how it goes at a mates place, since there isnt any signal at my place just yet

I got woosh about 6 weeks ago, and all i can say is i am not happy with it at all.
firstly i paid $449 for the modem, now the c@#ts are selling it for 199..
anyway, i'm over that, but their *reasonable use clause* states that they'll be calling anyone who is using 10 times the average.
i got a call after my first month saying that i was way above the average which they claimed was 700MB . what a load of cock i say. who the hell would fork out 450 bucks to use it for just browsing the web and email?
no one i know!
and they don't distingush between NZ and international traffic, which you may think is a good thing, but no, cause you cant hit the NZ file sharing servers with all you've got, cause it all counts. with jetstart i could download 50gigs a month nationally if i wanted to, not with woosh.

all the speed is good for is downloading, and then to get max speed you have to use a download manager such as flashget. otherwise i dont get more than 20Kb/s. with flashget i can manage 30 everytime. its nothing impressive when it comes to browsing cause of the poor latency.

the latency is far to high for my needs. i wish i did my research before getting it. I can't even listen to a 128kbps mp3 stream without it continually pausing because its so poor. i tried gaming (MOHAA) with it and just kept getting killed cause i couldn't see what the hell was going on. the pings are higher than dial up.

i wouldn't bother getting it, if you really want it, you can buy my modem off me and i'll trade it for ADSL anyday. my bro has 128k jetstart and has no trouble gaming, and can actually listen to 128k mp3 streams better than i can.

enough said
woosh is all hype. all it is good for is its portability. but i dont have a laptop.

TJ

Hi everyone,
1st post on here.

Re Woosh.... its not really woosh at all. Its Slush, cause as TeeJay said the latency is really bad. I got it for a client who's in building wiring is too bad for ADSL, and I can now say that I'll only use Woosh if I have no other choice.

What I don't get is why there is not a balanced review on Woosh in the papers / Magz yet, cause it not as good a product as they claimed.

Cheers
Zapf

1. Its not Telecoms Product
2. They bleated all about it and accepted the hype as true
3. To do real jounalisim they would have to actually use it which I doubt any did
4. Again its not Telecom

My views are biased [/list]

Hahaha... sounds like you work for Telecom

Yes how ever the above still rings true

Something that has over 200ms of latency is not broadband no matter whose marketing engine you want to believe

They are obviously wary of Wired Country's storm onto the market - after all, the papers say it will be less than a month now.
They (Woosh) are offering the first 8 weeks free when you sign up for 6 months. They are trying to lock you in weeks before Wired country brings out reasonable internet access to a large percentage of Auckland.

-John

Should be before anyone else brings in Broadband access to area

My choice would be Jetstream, Wired County then toss up to a Company that lies and good ole dialup, so far dialup is winning by default.

You obviously haven't seen or heard any of the Wired Country offerings.
AFAIK they will be pretty much the same accounts for Auckland.
The wired country plans are here

Wired Country has no imediate plans to provide to South Auckland although their was a news item that said they would within a year.

I quoted that as I meant to say something else but it wasn't nice so didn't bother

Anyhow will wait for Jetstream as still been the best service in Auckland, be nice if TC spent some of the cash and invested futher into NZ with cable in Auckland

So how do you feel now that you get 8 weeks free with a connection? does that mean YOU now get 8 weeks for nothing as a loyal foundation customer??????

BTW - I think the current offer to NEW customers (8 weeks free) is a real "finger" to the initial customers - I know of two who are VERY unhappy about still paying as they.

Come on Woosh - give 8 weeks free to your existing users.

Marketing gone wrong....

Hooked you didn't it?

Whoosh is just Walker Wireless rebranded. Its crap, they come the your place to see if you have line of sight, what they're actually doing is seeing if youre a heavy downloader or not (took one look at us, students) and then pointed to a house miles away at a 70 degree angle to the LOS and says that we cant get it because the signal will reflect off the house.

BS.

Then again, no matter what anyone says, Telecom aint that great either.

Er Woosh doesn't need LOS..... I assume you need to have decent reception from a transmitter but LOS is not necessary....... It uses CDMA I think.

While I don't like Wooshs offering's much, I don't personally think their recent deal is to compete with Wired Country but with Telecom's new Surf packages and the free installation offer they have. Surely you must have noticed both deals end about the same time?

I'd have to agree the highly variable latency is a problem. Although I don't think it's fair to claim it is not broadband. Broadband internet, not just here but international, usually just refers to the connection speed only not the latency. You will often find high speed satellite referred to as broadband despite the high latency. While high latency is obviously bad for VOIP, gaming and browsing it doesn't really affect downloading etc that much. (Streaming video and audio should work fine provided it can meet the sustained transfer rate required, loss isn't too great and you have enough buffering.) I do think the latency issue should be mentioned tho...

One thing perhaps which Woosh should do is to look into the ways satellite providers have dealt with TCP's slow start problem. This will mean browsing should be that affected by the high latency although gaming and VOIP obviously still will...

Also Wired Country has put up equipment pointing to the south at Sky Tower and of course, their home base is in the Franklin/Pukekohe/Papakura so I they are offering and going to be offering some service to parts of south Auckland.

P.S. I don't think 60ms is a very good average for dialup latency... 100-120ms is more accurate

P.P.S. The best service in Auckland is Wired Country by far IMHO (specifically Ihug and EzySurf/ICONZ plans) even tho, as said, they only cover those within LOS of SkyTower north and south (and that's still not official) + Franklin/Pukekohe/Papakura areas at the moment :-( Also some parts of Hamilton but that's a different matter...

I have had Woosh for about 6 months now.
Initially I was getting about 18k per second download speed for large files. Pings were 250ms at best and up to around 750ms at worst..

The First improvement was made by experimenting with the packet size by pinging (with the do not fragment switch set) the most common sites I visit to see what the MTU really needed to be.
Woosh will tell you something like 1476, but this was far to big. I arrived at 1334 from memory as the best size.
This reduced lost packets and improved download speeds to over 20k per second.

However in the last week my connection has vastly improved. I'm in the meadowbank/remuera area. signal quality has gone from a delta of 5 to 14. And sustained download speeds have reached 26k per second, which is OK.

Most importantly Ping times are far better.
Best is 67ms, worst 232ms usually averaging out at between 120ms and 140ms consistiently.

Any other updates on woosh? Especially if you're based on the North Shore of Auckland?

I'm moving into a flat in December in Albany which only just has coverage.

I'm renting and have no idea how long I'll be there, so don't want to pay the installation fees of telecom or wired country (also don't have LOS to the sky tower).

I'd also be keen to use VOIP if they get it working before Christmas.

I have to say, if they're improving, I'm willing to give it a stab.

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