Hi All,
Has anyone had much experience with Spark Wireless Broadband? I recently ditched the highly over subscribed and underperforming (10Mbps) DSL service to go with Sparks Wireless Broadband offering (Skinny have something similar...). It has over trippled my download speed with upload speeds to match.
However I was expecting even greater speeds being that I have line-of-sight to the Spark tower and can see it from my house at a distance of approximately 600 meters. Not only that I have mounted an external 900Mhz LTE broadband directional antena on the roof pointing in the direction of the tower. This is fully cabled on a 20m run back to the Huawei B315 LTE modem. I live in Auckland by the way so plenty of towers but because DSL is so poo in some of the suburbs here I've gone for a RBI setup in the city - go figure, also not waiting around until 2018 for fibre. The LTE modem is on 4G only - full bars for signal strength.
What I get when running speedtest.net (via ethernet to the LTE modem) initially is that the dial maxes out between 80-100Mbps (cool!). However subsequent tests drop back to 30-40Mbps which makes me think that after my initial *suprise here i am* test things get throttled back by something in the Telco infrastructure. I guessing to prevent bandwidth hogs like myself. I run the same speed test from a data enabled mobile phone on Spark at get 90Mbps+ every time so it seems it knows the difference between a mobile device and the LTE modem.
So my questions are: 1. Does Spark throttle LTE traffic for Wireless Broadband 2. Are the LTE modems bound to any one particular tower 3. Anyone else made the move to Wireless Broadband? If so what has your experience been like?