As with normal wired Internet connections, you want to be sure that your new wireless Internet is going to be up most of the time. Preferably we want and need our Internet service to be up all of the time. In reality there are things out of our hands that mean that we turn our computer on and nothing is working. We check our equipment and find out that everything is fine and our hearts drop knowing that our Internet Service Provider (ISP) has something faulty somewhere. Of course, this can happen with both wired and wireless Internet connection types.
The things that can go wrong with a wired connection are numerous. A core router could fail. A physical line can be accidentally severed because some one decided to dig a whole and did not check to see if they were allowed to in that spot. Another reason could be that a card in the exchange may have failed. All of these things require hardware to be changed. These are all the downsides to having a wired connection and it compromises the uptime of ISP’s that use this technology.
You may think that wireless connections do not have these problems at all and this is where you are wrong. Having wireless connections still mean that hardware is required. The type of things that will affect wireless internet provider uptime would be failure of a core router just the same as conventional connections. However, the advantage is that the chance for stupid people to accidentally dig into a line is eliminated. It can also be said that at the moment WISP’s (Wireless Internet Service Providers) are not so common and so if there is a fault the service team can fix it quite quickly.
There are wireless access points around that place with equipment that can also have faults. As mentioned above these can be fixed quite quickly. One other thing that you need to be aware of is your location. You need line of sight from the wireless transmitter to your wireless receiver. If this is not the case then you are unlikely to be able to use the service. This will not affect your uptime but will affect whether or not you are able to even get the service to your home.
There are a few things to consider when it comes to wireless service uptime. Just like wired connections there is a possibility of hardware faults and failures. However there is no risk of third party accidents disrupting your wireless internet providers service to you.
By: Andrew Croning