Hailing back to when I went to University and had the first taste of cable TV + internet, its since been a steady fixture in every house I'd lived in. Whilst the cost has gone up however, I often feel that nothing much has changed since the 90's apart from my growing apathy towards paying through the nose for what must be considered a basic service these days.
So our household recently cut the cable cord for the first time *.
(*although technically, back when we lived above City Beer Store, the building had Webpass microwave internet installed as well as cable - 100Mbs up/down!).
UI, UI, UI
One of my biggest issues with cable TV was, and still is the UI. Not only is it slow (a quick shout out to Virgin Media in the UK, who I actually had to round to my house in 2003 because I thought that the box was broken or misconfigured, such was the sluggishness in the interface) but its full of formatting issues, dumb questions and has a navigation speed 2 knots below a slow boat to China.
Much has been written about this over the years, yet in 2013, the only selection of cable boxes I could get in my postcode (a fairly mainstream area of San Francisco) still has this 'classic' design. And they ask over 120 bucks a month for this!!
MONKEY BRAINS ISP - SAN FRANCISCO
Monkey Brains is an ISP in San Francisco that supplies the internet to your home, via a dish on your roof. Its very much a local company, only handling business and residential connections in the city and even then, in select areas.
The dish they installed on my house is the Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5 (datasheet here). This uses a 5GHz channel (line of sight) running a proprietary protocol (AirMax TDMA), pointing to a concentrator node that sits on the MB backbone.
The install cost is 250$ which seems reasonable (the kit itself costs ~100$ and there is a free month of service thrown in).
PING AND BANDWIDTH
I have been known to obsess about the odd game now and then, and one thing we all know is that a lower the ping you have, the better the online player you are :) Running a few speed tests over the wire late at night, I got the following:
Running speed test from idle:
During netflix streaming (to the XBox):
This seems perfectly acceptable, although the upload speed is a little disappointing However, there are a few characteristics of the link that are not great:
Still, for 35$ a month, I have been happy with the service so far.
MICROWAVE POWER
The wife, whose input about the dish on our roof was still a popular topic in the house, had one additional interesting observation, namely that of the title of the wireless provider:
- "Will our 6 month old son be affected by the addition microwave output? Is this why they called it monkey brains?!"
Reading up on the topic, the output from this seems to be equivalent to 3 mobile phones, but highly directional and as long as you don't sunbathe in front of it, there is nothing to be worried about.
But I tried to cook my dinner on it anyway (Bavarian Bratwurst - very tasty).
Last word - apologies to our next door neighbors for hiding behind my balcony after I heard your kids shouting something about "fishing". You really didn't need to see a man standing in the rain with a baseball bat, cooking a sausage on his 'satellite dish'.
So our household recently cut the cable cord for the first time *.
(*although technically, back when we lived above City Beer Store, the building had Webpass microwave internet installed as well as cable - 100Mbs up/down!).
UI, UI, UI
One of my biggest issues with cable TV was, and still is the UI. Not only is it slow (a quick shout out to Virgin Media in the UK, who I actually had to round to my house in 2003 because I thought that the box was broken or misconfigured, such was the sluggishness in the interface) but its full of formatting issues, dumb questions and has a navigation speed 2 knots below a slow boat to China.
 |
| Image curtesy of http://unixjunkie.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-am-certainly-no-ui-guru-favorite-ui.html |
Much has been written about this over the years, yet in 2013, the only selection of cable boxes I could get in my postcode (a fairly mainstream area of San Francisco) still has this 'classic' design. And they ask over 120 bucks a month for this!!
MONKEY BRAINS ISP - SAN FRANCISCO
Monkey Brains is an ISP in San Francisco that supplies the internet to your home, via a dish on your roof. Its very much a local company, only handling business and residential connections in the city and even then, in select areas.
The dish they installed on my house is the Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5 (datasheet here). This uses a 5GHz channel (line of sight) running a proprietary protocol (AirMax TDMA), pointing to a concentrator node that sits on the MB backbone.
The install cost is 250$ which seems reasonable (the kit itself costs ~100$ and there is a free month of service thrown in).
PING AND BANDWIDTH
I have been known to obsess about the odd game now and then, and one thing we all know is that a lower the ping you have, the better the online player you are :) Running a few speed tests over the wire late at night, I got the following:
Running speed test from idle:
During netflix streaming (to the XBox):
This seems perfectly acceptable, although the upload speed is a little disappointing However, there are a few characteristics of the link that are not great:
- During peak hours, ping can jump to 300ms+ and downlink below 4Mbs
- There appears to be either a QoS or bandwidth reservation process going on that causes some streaming sites to stutter when starting up (again, during peak hours). When established however, they work fine. Youtube is particularly bad here for some reason, often falling back to poor quality stream before it recovers.
Still, for 35$ a month, I have been happy with the service so far.
MICROWAVE POWER
The wife, whose input about the dish on our roof was still a popular topic in the house, had one additional interesting observation, namely that of the title of the wireless provider:
- "Will our 6 month old son be affected by the addition microwave output? Is this why they called it monkey brains?!"
Reading up on the topic, the output from this seems to be equivalent to 3 mobile phones, but highly directional and as long as you don't sunbathe in front of it, there is nothing to be worried about.
But I tried to cook my dinner on it anyway (Bavarian Bratwurst - very tasty).
 |
| After 30 mins, the sausage hadn't cooked. |
Last word - apologies to our next door neighbors for hiding behind my balcony after I heard your kids shouting something about "fishing". You really didn't need to see a man standing in the rain with a baseball bat, cooking a sausage on his 'satellite dish'.
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