Wireless Broadband Service: A wireless broadband service uses an arrangement of fixed antennas that allows the users to have access with high speed Internet wirelessly over the air. It delivers fast Internet access by means of radio waves as a replacement for of cables or wires.

Broadly, when someone talks about ‘wireless’, there are two possible meanings – wireless broadband and wireless networking.

Wireless Broadband allows connection to the internet at high speed without the need for wires. A radio transmitter is installed and aligned to a “base-station” providing an always-on broadband connection.

Wireless networking refers to having a ‘wire free’ computer in the house or office linked to a broadband connection. It is a method of linking all of the computers in one area (such as your home) to one internet connection through a wireless network. As the name suggests, by going wireless you do not need to have wires attaching each PC so they can share the internet connection – instead you use a wireless router which sends a signal to each computer using radio waves.

Advantages of Wireless

Wireless connectivity allows users to access a high-speed internet connection, quickly and securely. There are no cables to lay so connections can be made in a matter of hours. There is no need to make any changes to existing phone lines, in fact you don't even need a phone line. Over-the-air encryption scrambles data bits and prevents interception. Subscriber equipment locking (Only allows authorised subscriber equipment to connect to the base station.

What does Broadband give you?

With Broadband you can download web pages much quicker than you can with a regular dial-up or an ISDN connection. Broadband is ideal for downloading large files such as movies, music, mp3 files and e-mails with files attached. These quicker speeds will make your internet usage much more efficient saving you time and money while also making your internet experience much more enjoyable.

Wireless Versus Cabled

Wireless Broadband is available now, and can be installed in hours, it is a lot more flexible than DSL and can be moved from site to site without much hassle.

Contention ratio

If you are wondering what is “contention ratio” then it is basically a word for sharing. If you have seen that a broadband provider has a contention ration of “50:1” and another broadband provider has a contention ratio of "20:1" and you don't know what this means or which one is best then it is quite simple.

The “contention ratio” is the maximum number of other people you will have to share the connection infrastructure with. So a contention ratio of 50:1 would mean that the maximum number of people you could be sharing the connection with at anytime is 49 other people. If all 50 people were downloading at the same time then your download speed could drop hugely, in reality though this doesn't happen and you can enjoy much faster download speeds.

So from this you can see that a contention ratio of “30:1” would be more beneficial than a contention ratio of “50:1”.